Josh Emmons was born in Bangkok and grew up in northern California. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he published his first novel with Scribner in 2005, “The Loss of Leon Meed,” which won a Copernicus-James Michener Award and has been translated into French, Hebrew, German and Dutch. His second book, “Prescription for a Superior Existence,” came out in 2008 from Scribner, and a Turkish translation is forthcoming. His fiction and non-fiction have appeared in “The American Scholar,” “The New York Times Book Review,” “McSweeney’s Quarterly,” “Details,” “People,” “FiveChapters,” “Esquire,” “The San Francisco Chronicle,” and elsewhere.

Two of his short stories have been given honorable mention in “The Best American Non-required Reading,” and he has received several fellowships to the Yaddo Colony in Saratoga Springs, NY. Emmons has taught at Grinnell College, the University of Iowa and Loyola University, and he is now an assistant professor of creative writing at Monmouth University. He lives in Philadelphia.

www.joshemmons.com

Meena Alexander considered one of the foremost Indian poets of her generation, was born in India and raised both there and in Sudan. At eighteen she went to England to study. She has published six volumes of poetry including Illiterate Heart, which won the PEN Open Book Award, Raw Silk and Quickly Changing River. She has also published three chapbooks of poetry: The Storm: A Poem in Five Parts, Night-Scene, the Garden and in 2012 Shimla. Her poems have been translated into several languages including French, German, Spanish, Swedish, Italian, Macedonian, Arabic, Malayalam and Hindi.

She is the editor of Indian Love Poems and author of the volume of poems and short prose pieces: The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience. Her memoir Fault Lines was picked as one of Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of the year. Poetics of Dislocation appeared in 2009 in the Poets on Poetry Series, University of Michigan Press. Her prose includes two novels, Nampally Road and Manhattan Music and two academic studies on early English Romanticism, one of which is Women in Romanticism: Mary Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth and Mary Shelley.

Her fellowships include those from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Fulbright Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation and Arts Council of England as well as the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies. She has been in residence at the McDowell Colony and at Yaddo where she had the Martha Walsh Pulver Fellowship for a Poet.

The day will consist of readings by nationally known poets, some of whom will conduct poetry workshops for participants. The keynote readers will be Pulitzer Prize winner Stephen Dunn and Cave Canem Fellow Rachel Eliza Griffiths.

Stephen Dunn was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for Different Hours. His many other books include New and Selected Poems, 1974-1994, What Goes On: Selected and New Poems 1995-2009, and, most recently, Here and Now.

Rachel Eliza Griffiths is the author of Miracle Arrhythmia, The Requited Distance, and, most recently, Mule & Pear. A photographer and painter as well as a poet, she teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.

In addition, a dozen nationally known local poets will give brief readings: Gabe Barabas, Michael Broek, Prescott Evarts, Laura McCullough, Yesenia Montilla, Mihaela Moscaliuc, Suzanne Parker, Lauren Schmidt, Michael Paul Thomas, Michael Waters, BJ Ward, and Daniel Weeks. The festival will culminate with a reading by registered participants.

Admission to the readings is free and open to the public.

The workshops, also free, will be open to registrants only. To register, e-mail Dr. Michael Waters no later than Wednesday, November 7, at mgwaters@monmouth.edu.

Please see the schedule below for reading and workshop times. This event is co-sponsored by the Long Branch Arts Council, the Wayne D. McMurray School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Monmouth University, the Department of English at Monmouth University, and The Monmouth Review.

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9-10 a.m.
Sign-in for registrants in Bey Hall (refreshments).
The Monmouth Review distributed to participants.

10-11 a.m.: Reading:
Laura McCullough / BCC
Michael Broek / BCC
Suzanne Parker / BCC
Gabe Barabas / NJ Repertory Company
Lauren Schmidt / MU
BJ Ward / Warren CC

11 a.m. -12 p.m.: Workshops

12-1 p.m.: Lunch for registrants

1-2 p.m.: Reading:

Michael Paul Thomas / MU
Prescott Evarts Jr. / MU
Mihaela Moscaliuc / MU
Dan Weeks / MU
Yesenia Montilla / NYC
Michael Waters / MU

2-3 p.m.: Workshops

3-4 p.m.: Reading:

Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Stephen Dunn

4-5 p.m.: Participants’ reading

Awarding-winning author Mary Gaitskill is best known for delivering powerful stories of dislocation, longing, and desire with prose that “glides lightly over unsoundable depths” [Village Voice]. She is the author of the novels Two Girls, Fat and Thin, and Veronica, which was nominated for the 2005 National Book Award, National Critic’s Circle Award, and L.A. Times Book Award. She is the author of the story collections Bad Behavior and Because They Wanted To, which was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner in 1998. Bad Behavior, now a classic, made critical waves when it was first published, heralding Gaitskill’s arrival on the literary scene and established her as one of the sharpest, erotically charged, and audaciously funny writing talents of contemporary literature. Her newest collection of stories is titled Don’t Cry (2009):Written with her distinctive, uncanny combination of bluntness and high lyricism, Don’t Cry takes its place among artworks of great moral seriousness.” [Bomb Magazine]

Mary Gaitskill was born in 1954 in Lexington, Kentucky. In 1981 Gaitskill graduated from the University of Michigan, where she won an award for her collection of short fiction The Woman Who Knew Judo and Other Stories.

There is no more versatile and accomplished American writer than Joyce Carol Oates. The author of many books, Oates has penned bestselling novels, critically acclaimed collections of short fiction, as well as essays, plays, poetry, a recent memoir, A Widow’s Story, and an unlikely bestseller, On Boxing. Her remarkable literary industry – which includes work as an editor and anthologist – spans forms, themes, topics and genres. Writing in The Nation, critic Henry Louis Gates Jr. said, “A future archeologist equipped only with her oeuvre could easily piece together the whole of postwar America.” In 2010, reflecting the widespread esteem in which her work is held, President Barack Obama awarded Oates the National Humanities Medal.
 
Best known for her fiction, Oates’ novels include them, which won the National Book Award; Blonde, a bold reimagining of the inner life of Marilyn Monroe; The Falls, which won the France’s Prix Femina; The Gravedigger’s Daughter and Little Bird of Heaven, each set in upstate New York; and We Were the Mulvaneys, which follows the disintegration of an American family and which became a bestseller after being selected by Oprah’s Book Club. Her 2012 publications include the novels Daddy Love, and  Mudwoman, and Black Dahlia & White Rose, a collection of stories. Her novel, The Accursed, was released in March 2013. Her recent novel Carthage (January 2014) was a New York Times bestseller. Her new book is High Crime Area: Tales of Darkness and Dread (April 2014).
High Lonesome: New and Selected Stories 1966-2006 gathers Oates’ short fiction from earlier collections and includes eleven additional tales that further demonstrate the artistry and originality of a writer who “has imbued the American short story with an edgy vitality and raw social surfaces” (Chicago Tribune). Included in this volume is Oates’ most anthologized short story, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Inspired by a song by Bob Dylan, it was later adapted as a film, Smooth Talk. It is one of a handful of Oates’ works made into films or movies for television. The latest adaption is Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang (2012), by Palme d’Or winner Laurent Cantet.
 
Since 1963, forty of Oates’s books have been included on the New York Times list of notable books of the year. Among her many honors are two O. Henry Prizes and two Bram Stoker Awards, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, World Fantasy Award, and M. L. Rosenthal Award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. In 2009, Oates was given the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award by the National Book Critics Circle. In 2012, she was awarded both the Mailer Prize for Lifetime Achievement and the PEN Center USA Award for Lifetime Achievement. In March 2014 she will be awarded the Poets & Writers Distinguished Lifetime Award.

Joyce Carol Oates is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University, and since 1978, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Brooks Haxton was born in Greenville, Mississippi, in 1950. His books include six collections of poems from Knopf, two book-length narrative poems, and one book of creative non-fiction. He has also written introductions to five books, essays, and the script of an American Masters Series film on Tennessee Williams, nationally broadcast on PBS. Since the mid-seventies, his poems and prose have been appearing in Atlantic Monthly, New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, and Paris Review. His work has been acclaimed by critics at All Things Considered, The New York Times, Newsweek Online, Time Magazine, The Village Voice, and The Washington Post. His four books of translations from Classical Greek, French, and German have included an alternate selection for the Book-of-the-Month Club. He has received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Guggenheim Foundation, among others. In 2013 the Fellowship of Southern Writers presented him with the Hanes Award, recognizing a distinguished body of work by a poet in mid-career. He lives with his wife and children in Syracuse, where he has taught for twenty years at Syracuse University.

Brian Turner is a soldier-poet who is the author of two poetry collections, Phantom Noise (2010) and Here, Bullet (2005) which won the 2005 Beatrice Hawley Award, the New York Times “Editor’s Choice” selection, the 2006 Pen Center USA “Best in the
West” award, and the 2007 Poets Prize, among others. He also has a memoir, My Life as a Foreign Country (2014) that retraces his war experience. Turner served seven years in the US Army, to include one year as an infantry team leader in Iraq with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. Prior to that, he was deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1999-2000 with the 10th Mountain Division. Turner’s poetry has been published in Poetry Daily, The Georgia Review, and other journals, and in the Voices in Wartime Anthology published in conjunction with the feature-length documentary film of the same name. Turner was also featured in Operation Homecoming, a unique documentary that explores the firsthand accounts of American servicemen and women through their own words. He earned an MFA from the University of Oregon and has lived abroad in South Korea. In 2009, Turner was selected as one of fifty United States Artists Fellows.