WE’VE GOT A NEW LOCATION!
Fords Oyster House & Cajun Kitchen, 631 S. Main, just across the street from Chicora Alley. We will meet upstairs, where there will be a
cash bar. Patrons are encouraged to come early and order dinner downstairs, which they can take “to go” upstairs. The number for dinner reservations is: 233-6009. MAP
Reading Room is from 7:00-8:30 PM. All Reading Room writers and the dates of their readings will be announced as soon as confirmed. Please check back. If you subscribe to the Emrys Calendar, your personal calendar will automatically alert you when new information is posted.
January 23rd – Allan Michael Parker and Celisa Steele
Alan Michael Parker is the author of two novels, Whale Man (WordFarm, 2011) and Cry Uncle, along with seven collections of poems, Days Like Prose, The Vandals, Love Song with Motor Vehicles, A Peal of Sonnets, Elephants & Butterflies, Ten Days (with painter Herb Jackson), and Long Division (forthcoming from Tupelo Press in 2012). He served as Editor of The Imaginary Poets, and co-editor of two other volumes of scholarship. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker, Paris Review, Pleiades, and The Yale Review, among other magazines, and are forthcoming widely, including in The Best American Poetry, 2011 as well as the new Pushcart Prize anthology; his prose has appeared in journals including The Believer, The New York Times Book Review, and The New Yorker.He has received numerous awards and fellowships, including two Pushcart Prizes, the Fineline Prize from the Mid-American Review, and the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. As an undergraduate, he was invited to join the graduate poetry workshop at Washington University, where he studied with Donald Finkel, Howard Nemerov, and Mona Van Duyn. As a graduate student in the School of the Arts at Columbia University, where he received his M.F.A. in Writing, Alan Michael Parker studied with Carolyn Forche, Richard Howard, Denis Johnson, Stanley Kunitz, William Matthews, and Nobel Laureates Joseph Brodsky and Czeslaw Milosz.
Since 1998, Alan Michael Parker has taught at Davidson College, where he is Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing; he is also a Core Faculty Member in the Queens University low-residency M.F.A. program. He lives in Davidson, NC, with his partner, the artist Felicia van Bork.
Celisa Steele’s poetry has appeared in Tar River Poetry, Anglican Theological Review, The South Carolina Review, Kakalak, Wild Goose Poetry Review, and others, and her first poetry chapbook, How Language Is Lost, was published by Emrys Press in 2011. Her poems have won the Broad River Review’s 2011 Rash Award in Poetry, The South Carolina Review’s 2010 Poetry Contest, and the 2010 Nâzım Hikmet Poetry Competition, as well as awards from the North Carolina Poetry Society and the North Carolina Poetry Council.
Celisa graduated summa cum laude from the University of Arkansas with a double major in English and French. Her love of languages and literature then took her to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she completed a master’s in comparative literature. She has remained in the Tar Heel State and now makes her home in the Paris of the Piedmont, Carrboro, where she lives with her husband and two children. Celisa is managing director at Tagoras, which provides strategy, marketing, and technology guidance to organizations in the business of lifelong learning. She served as first vice president of the North Carolina Poetry Society from January 2009 to May 2011 and currently chairs the organization’s long-range planning committee; she has been on the Poetry Council of North Carolina since 2005; and she is an inaugural member of the Carrboro Poets Council.
Ron Rash describes Celisa as “one of the Carolinas’ finest poets,” and Janice Moore Fuller calls her “a nimble metalinguist.” Anthony S. Abbott finds in How Language Is Lost a delightful play of language, a sheer joy at how language is not lost, how language can take any experience and transform it into passion, into humor, into fresh and unusual insights into the seemingly ordinary experiences of life. More information about Celisa and her poetry is available HERE.
February 27th – Wayne Cox and Angela Kelly
Wayne Cox was born in Portland, Maine. He earned a Ph.D. from USC and currently teaches at Anderson College, where he currently serves as Chair of the Department of English. A recipient of Fulbright and NEA fellowships, his work has appeared in such places as Poetry, Shenandoah, Chelsea, and Stand. With his wife, Lourdes Manyé, he published Vacation Notebook (Lang, 1996), a translation of Quadern de Vacances, by the Catalan poet Miquel Martí i Pol. His second book, The Things We Leave Behind (2000) was published by Ninety-Six Press. He lives in Greenville with his wife and two daughters.
Angela Kelly is the author of four chapbooks: Being the Camel, those banded and coherent, Weighing the body back down, and Post Script from The House of Dreams, winner of the 2006 South Carolina Initiative Poetry Prize. She is also the recipient of the Yemassee Poetry Prize, and a South Carolina Literary Fellowship. Her work has appeared in such places as The Bloomsbury Review, The North American Review, Inkwell, and Kalliope, among many others. She holds a BA in literature from USC Upstate, and lives in Spartanburg.
March 26th – Michel Stone and TBA
Michel Stone has published more than a dozen stories and essays in journals, magazines, and books. Her work has appeared numerous times in the Raleigh News and Observer’s emerging Southern writers series. She is a 2011 recipient of the South Carolina Fiction Project Award, given by the South Carolina Arts Commission. She is an alumna of the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Raised on Johns Island on the South Carolina coast, Michel now lives in Spartanburg, S.C. The Iguana Tree is her first book.
April 23rd
Students from the Fine Arts Center and from the South Carolina Governor’s School of the Arts and Humanities
May 28th – Philip Gerard and Nancy Dew Taylor
Philip Gerard has published fiction and nonfiction in numerous magazines, including New England Review/Bread Loaf Quarterly, Creative Nonfiction, Hawai’i Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and The World & I. He is the author of three novels: Hatteras Light (Scribners 1986; Blair/ Salem paper 1997, nominated for the Ernest Hemingway Prize), Cape Fear Rising (Blair 1994), Desert Kill (William Morrow 1994; Piatkus in U.K. 1994); and two books of nonfiction, Brilliant Passage. . . a schooning memoir (Mystic 1989) and Creative Nonfiction– Researching and Crafting Stories of Real Life (Story Press 1996), which was a selection of the Book-of-the-Month and Quality Paperback Book Clubs . Maryanne Culpepper, director of story development for National Geographic Television, writes, “It is the manual for nonfiction storytellers. . . Creative Nonfiction is on every bookcase at National Geographic Television.”He has written nine half-hour shows for Globe Watch, an international affairs program, for PBS-affiliate WUNC-TV, Chapel Hill, N.C. , and international broadcast, and scripted two hour-long environmental documentaries, one of which, RiverRun- down the Cape Fear to the Sea, won a Silver Reel of Merit from the International Television Association in 1994. Two of his weekly radio essays have been broadcast on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered.
Gerard’s Writing a Book that Makes a Difference (Story Press, 2000), combines his dual passions of writing and teaching. His latest book of nonfiction Secret Soldiers (Dutton 2002; Plume softcover 2004) tells the story of an unlikely band of heroes in World War II: artists who fought the Nazis by creating elaborate scenarios of deception, conjuring phantom armored divisions out of sound effects, radio scripts, pyrotechnics, and inflatable tanks.
He teaches in the BFA and MFA Programs of the Department of Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, which he chairs. He has won the the Faculty Scholarship Award, the College of Arts & Science Teaching Award, the Chancellor’s Medal for Excellence in Teaching, the Graduate Mentor Award, the Board of Trustees Teaching Award, and a Distinguished Teaching Professorship. The Philip Gerard Fellowship, endowed by benefactor Charles F. Green III to honor Gerard’s work in establishing and directing the MFA program, is awarded annually to an MFA student on the basis of literary merit. Gerard has also been writer in residence at Bradford (MA) College and Old Dominion University (VA), has taught at the Sand Hills and Bread Loaf Writers Conferences, and conducted workshops at the Wildacres Summer Writers Retreat and Chautauqua Institution in New York. He is co-editor with his wife, Jill Gerard, of Chautauqua, the literary journal of the Chautauqua Writers’ Center, and is visiting faculty at Goucher College’s summer residency MFA program in Creative Nonfiction.
After teaching high school English in North and South Carolina and at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, the University of Puerto Rico, the University of South Carolina, and Lander University, Nancy Dew Taylor became a medical editor and teacher of medical ethics and medical humanities at the Greenville Hospital System. The North Carolina Humanities Council, a statewide nonprofit and affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities, recently announced Nancy is the recipient of its 2011 Linda Flowers Literary Award. Her entry Mill Creek Suite is a sequence of poems about a young married couple living on a farm near Old Fort, NC, in the early part of the 20th century. It was among more than 130 entries of original poetry, prose, and nonfiction submitted by writers across the country to the Humanities Council.
Her publications include a book, Annotations of William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses; short stories (in The South Carolina Review and Sargasso, a Caribbean journal); and poems in Kalliope, Scribble, The South Carolina Review, Appalachian Journal, Timber Creek Review, New England Watershed, and Tar River Poetry and in several anthologies. In November of 2008 Emrys Press published her chapbook, Stepping on Air. She lives in Greenville, SC.
The Emrys Reading Room Fall Schedule is funded in part by a grant from the Metropolitan Arts Council, which receives funding from the City of Greenville, BMW Manufacturing Company, LLC, Michelin North America, Inc., SEW Eurodrive and the South Carolina Arts Commission with support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John and Susan Bennett Memorial Arts Fund of the Coastal Community Foundation of SC.