New Books by Great Writers

A series of literary readings and workshops

This Year's Series - New Books by Great Writers 2007-2008

The Carnegie Center is proud to announce the third annual New Books by Great Writers reading and workshop series. Some of Kentucky’s finest literary talents, as well as exceptional writers with ties to the state, will be on hand to read from new work and to share their craft with workshop participants. Past readers in the series include Kim Edwards (The Memory Keeper’s Daughter), Silas House (The Coal Tattoo), Lynn Pruett (Ruby River), and this year’s program coordinator, poet Leatha Kendrick.

All readings are free and open to the public. Workshops are $25 each, or $100 for as many workshops as a subscriber wishes to attend in the 2006-2007 series.

Unless otherwise indicated, all readings and workshops will take place at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning, 251 W. Second Street, Lexington.

Thursday, Oct. 19 ERIK REECE

6:30 pm: Reading and signing of Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness
7:30-9 pm: Workshop: Using Investigative Journalism Techniques in the Lyric Personal Essay (cost $25)

ERIK REECE

Reece was born in Louisville, Kentucky and teaches writing at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. His debut work Lost Mountain examines the disastrous effects of mountaintop removal in Eastern Kentucky. His essay “Death of a Mountain” appeared in the April 2005 edition of Harper’s and earned the John B. Oakes Award for Distinguished Environmental Journalism from the Columbia University School of Journalism. His work also appears in The Oxford American, among other places.

Thursday, Nov. 9 MOLLY PEACOCK

6:30 pm: Reading and signing of Cornucopia: New and Selected Poems
7:30-9 pm: Workshop: The Poet’s Spoken Voice: Reading Aloud from Inside the Poem (cost: $25)

MOLLY PEACOCK

Peacock, a poet and a creative nonfiction writer, is the author of five books of poetry, including Cornucopia: New & Selected Poems. Among her other works are How To Read A Poem and Start A Poetry Circle and a memoir, Paradise, Piece By Piece. She is the editor of a collection of creative non-fiction, The Private I: Privacy in a Public World and the co-editor of Poetry in Motion: One Hundred Poems from the Subways and Buses. Peacock’s latest project is a one-woman staged monologue in poems, “The Shimmering Verge,” produced by Femme Fatale Productions, which she is performing in theatres throughout North America. She conducts quarterly poetry circles on Wisconsin Public Radio’s Here On Earth with Jean Feraca, and has read her poetry at the Library of Congress, the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y, and Harbourfront (Toronto) as well as at numerous colleges, universities, and libraries. Currently she teaches poetry and nonfiction in the Spalding University MFA program.

Thursday, Dec. 14 RICHARD TAYLOR

6:30 pm: Reading and signing of Sue Mundy: a Novel of the Civil War
7:30-9 pm: Workshop: Turning a Love of History into a Novel

In addition to Sue Mundy, former Kentucky Poet Laureate Taylor is the author of volumes of poetry and history, including Brain Tree, Stone Eye, and The Palisades of the Kentucky River, among others. Taylor received the Distinguished Professor Award at Kentucky State University in 1992 and has won two creative writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is a speaker for the Kentucky Humanities Council Speakers Bureau and an antiquarian book dealer. Taylor lives near Frankfort, where he owns Poor Richard's Books.

Thursday, Jan 18 ANDREA CHENG

6:30 pm: Reading and signing of Eclipse
7:30-9 pm: Workshop: TBA

Andrea Cheng is the author of several books for children and young adults. Her first novel, Marika, was selected by the city of Cincinnati for “On the Same page,” a citywide reading program. Honeysuckle House, Anna the Bookbinder, and Shanghai Messenger received Parent’s Choice Awards. Grandfather Counts was recently featured on Reading Rainbow. Her books draw on her background as the child of Hungarian immigrants as well as the background of her husband, the son of immigrants from China. Ms. Cheng studied Chinese at Cornell University, where she received a Masters degree in Linguistics. She and her family have traveled to both Budapest and Shanghai to get to know their extended families. In addition to writing books for children, Ms. Cheng teaches English as a Second Language at Cincinnati State Technical and Community College. She lives with her husband and their three children in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Thursday, Feb. 15 FRANK X WALKER

6:30 pm: Reading and signing of Buffalo Dance II: When Winter Comes
7:30-9 pm: Workshop: Literary Conjure: Crafting Authentic Persona Poems

Frank X Walker is the author of three poetry collections: Black Box (Old Cove Press, 2005); Buffalo Dance: the Journey of York (University of Kentucky Press, 2003), which won the Lillian Smith Book Award in 2004; and Affrilachia (Old Cove Press, 2000). Walker serves as a Visiting Professor of Rhetoric, Writing and Communication at Transylvania University and the publisher of the new Journal of Affrilachian Art & Culture, due out in spring 2007. He is also a visiting professor in Pan African Studies department at the University of Louisville. A 2005 recipient of the Lannan Literary Fellowship, he lives in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Thursday, Mar. 15 SUSAN RICHARDS

6:30 pm: Reading and signing of The Hanging in the Foaling Barn
7:30-9 pm: Workshop: Fiction: Finding the Dramatic in the Ordinary

Susan Starr Richards was born and raised in Winter Park, Florida, and has a B.A. from the University of Florida and an M.A. from the University of Washington. She taught for ten years at the University of Kentucky, and has spent the rest of her life working with racehorses, and writing. She has been a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in Fiction, and has received a Kentucky Arts Council Fellowship. Her stories have been anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Stories, and in Best New Stories from the South, and have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Sewanee Review, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, and in Thoroughbred Times, as winner of their first National Fiction Prize. Her essays have been published in Ms. Magazine, Essence, New Woman, and anthologized by Oxford University Press and The Odyssey Press. She was the 2004 Lecturer in American Literature at Doane College, Nebraska. Larkspur Press published The Life Horse, a book of poems, in 2005.

Thursday, Apr. 19 ANNE SHELBY

6:30 pm: Reading and signing of Appalachian Studies: Poems
7:30 pm: Workshop:

In addition to poetry, Anne Shelby is the author of newspaper columns, plays, essays, and children’s books. Can A Democrat Get Into Heaven? Politics, Religion, and Other Things You Ain’t Supposed To Talk About (EvaMedia, 2006) brings together Shelby’s popular columns, which have appeared over a number of years in The Lexington Herald-Leader and other Kentucky newspapers. Her plays, The Lone Pilgrim: Songs and Stories of Aunt Molly Jackson, and The Adventures of Molly Whuppie, based on Eastern Kentucky folk tales, and Passing Through the Garden: The Work of Belinda Mason have been widely produced. Her essays and fiction are included in the University Press of Kentucky collections Back Talk: Confronting Appalachian Stereotypes, Bloodroot: Appalachian Women Writers’ Reflections on Place, Kentucky Women, and A Kentucky Christmas. She has published five books for children: Potluck, The Someday House, What To Do About Pollution, Homeplace, a School Library Journal Best Book, and We Keep A Store, an American Bookseller Pick of the Lists.

Thursday, Apr. 26 SENA JETER NASLUND & JOHN SIMS JETER

6:30 pm: Reading and Signing of Abundance: a novel of Marie Antionette and And the Angels Sang
7:30 pm: Workshop:

Sena Jeter Naslund is Writer in Residence at the University of Louisville, program director of the Spalding University brief-residency MFA in Writing, and current Kentucky Poet Laureate. Recipient of the Harper Lee Award and the Southeastern Library Association Fiction Award, she is editor of The Louisville Review and the Fleur-de-Lis Press. She is the author of the novels Ahab's Wife, Four Spirits, and Sherlock in Love and a collection of stories, The Disobedience of Water. She lives in Louisville, Kentucky.

Funded in part by the Kentucky Arts Council and the Knight Foundation Fund at Blue Grass Community Foundation.

Watch this space for more information as it becomes available.

The Carnegie Center is proud to announce the winners and finalists of our inaugural NEXT GREAT WRITERS competition:

Grand Prize Winner ($100):
"Sam Shepard's Secret Fear of Flying" by Randi Ewing
Second Place ($50): "The Kentucky Notes" by Ellen Hagan

Finalists:
"Winner" by Milton Toby
"Cannonballs and Handbells" by Heather Russell
"Searching for Something to Hold" by Naomi Clewett
"Ruffian" by Christy Cassadyv "Failure to Fly" by Bev Olert
"Up at the Barn" by Alexander Hume
"The New Husbandry" by Bev Olert
"It's Come to This" by Gail Koehler

Congratulations to our Next Great Writers!