Join HWC for an evening of Poetry + Pizza TOMORROW, April 30th at Howe Writing Center from 6:00 – 7:30 PM. Open mic! Bring your own poetry, a favorite poem, or other creative writing. Listen to readers, eat pizza, and enter a raffle! All are welcome.
Alumna poet Rita Dove will join us virtually for a reading and conversation including creative writing poetry faculty in the Heritage Room, Shriver Center. You can check out a recent Paris Review Interview of the US Poet Laureate Emeritus and Pulitzer Prize winner in which she speaks about her time at Miami and its influence on her.
You can find our Alumni testimonials page here.
Please join us as we host three publishing professionals–Lisa Ampleman, the Cincinnati Review & Acre Books; Kayla Lightner, Ayesha Pande Literary; and Miami Alumnus Todd Seabrook, The Cupboard Pamphlet–who will answer questions about publishing your creative work, as well as careers in publishing.
Each year the Creative Writing Program brings in members of the publishing industry–such as editors, publishers, agents, and authors–often alumni or friends of the program. This year we are doing it by Zoom. Please sign up using the QR code in the brochure or this link:
register here in advance:
https://miamioh.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYkfuGqqTsqEtTE5WdUQzPgyBg6l4jEo4bV
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Join the Department of English and the Center for Career Exploration and Success (CCES) for Spill the Tea: English Edition, an afternoon of career-development workshops followed by an alumni panel, on Tuesday, April 9 in Shriver’s Heritage Room. There will be prizes, swag, and delicious food!
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By: Savannah Trent
I sat down, well more accurately sat down and logged into google chat, to talk to poet Hoa Nguyen to ask her about identity, belonging, and the diasporic experience. Nguyen, whose 2016 book length collection of poems Violet Energy Ingots was shortlisted for the 2017 Griffin prize in poetry, is a poet whose work is known for its melodic quality, weaving rhyme, non sequiturs, syllabic play, and references to Sappho and Shakespeare among others. Born in the Mekong Delta, she was raised in the Washington DC area during the time of punk, post-punk and the Reagan presidency though she now resides in Toronto where she teaches creative writing and serves as a mentor to Miami University’s low residency program in creative writing. She is also the author of Dark (Skanky Possum 1998), Your ancient see through (AA Arts 2001), Hecate Lochia (Hot Whiskey 2009), As long as trees last (Wave 2012) and Red Juice: Poems 1998-2008 (Wave 2014).
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At the start of this semester, I wanted to begin a series of interviews with professors; I believe our faculty are what make the entire Miami English department special and I hoped to use the platform to showcase that. Now that so much has changed as a result of the pandemic, I hope this series can also help future students get to know the creative writing program since they can’t come visit in person. To kick this series off and continue with our National Poetry Month theme, I I interviewed poetry professor cris cheek about his work:
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Born in Honolulu in 1944, Jim Chapson attended San Francisco State University and received his MA in 1968. With his partner, the Irish poet James Liddy (1934–2008), he moved to Milwaukee in 1976 and taught in the UW-Milwaukee English Department as an adjunct until 2016. He served as Poet Laureate of the City of Milwaukee from 2014 to 2016. He spends most of his time reading, writing and shopping at Whole Foods.
I once wrote that Jim’s poems move deftly between razor-sharp satire and passionate spiritual concern. I’ve also been close friends with him for many years and understand how important he is to his former students and poets in Milwaukee.
Paul Vogel: What was growing up in Hawaii like? What does your haole identity mean to you?
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cris cheek is a documentary performance writer, sound composer, and photographer. They worked alongside Bob Cobbing and Bill Griffiths with the Consortium of London Presses in the mid 1970’s to run a thriving open access print shop for little press poets. In 1981 they co-founded a collective movement-based performance resource in the east end of London at Chisenhale Dance Space, working in collaboration with choreographers, musicians, and performance artists to make interdisciplinary events. cris taught Performance Writing at Dartington College of Arts (1995-2002), played music with Sianed Jones and Philip Jeck as Slant, collaborated on works about value and recycling with Kristen Lavers in Things Not Worth Keeping and has been a professor at Miami University in Ohio since 2005. cris lives in Cincinnati. Most recent publications are the church and the school, the beer (Critical Documents, 2007), part:short life housing (The Gig, 2009), pickles & jams (BlazeVOX Books, 2017), and fukc all the king’s men: the tower and a few beasts living in its rubble (Xerolage, 2019). They podcast with Mark Hagood as Phantom Power: sounds about sound.
It would be, in every sense, a fool’s errand to try and pin down what particularly interested me so thoroughly in cris cheek’s work that I was compelled to reach out to them for an interview; not because it couldn’t be done, but because any attempt to delineate singular points of interest would inevitably only serve to push away others just as present as I read their work. To say, for example, that I was drawn immediately to the way in cheek’s pickles & jams that words, lines, even stanzas dance staggeringly across the page, often floating towards and juking away from stability, while certainly true, would ignore how equally pulled I felt toward the way cheek’s refusal of alphabetic context in fukc all the king’s men: the tower and a few beasts living in its rubble simultaneously implodes reading-as-such and constructs images so literal they refuse to not be read. Perhaps the most sensible argument I can make for the following interview is that cheek’s work is, at every point, a performance; therefore, like all great performances, cheek’s work inspired in me the festering curiosity that ignites every behind-the-scenes documentary. I needed to know the distance between the artist in the wings and art unfolding on stage. More importantly, I needed to know how, and by what crafty devices, the distance might be crossed so fluidly, so fully, and with such clarity of motion that I found myself unsure the distance actually existed.
Continue readingHere is the first in a series of student creative writing readings. Sophomore Madi McGirr reads her poem “19” which is after the poem “21” by Patrick Roche. You can read this poem as well as other poems and art by Madi in this year’s forthcoming issue of the Femellectual.