Lawrence Millman is the author of eleven books, including Northern Latitudes, Last Places, An Evening Among Headhunters, and Lost in the Arctic. His travel articles have appeared in such magazines as Smithsonian, National Geographic Adventure, The Atlantic Monthly, Sports Illustrated, and Islands. He has made 30 trips and expeditions to the Arctic and Subarctic, discovered a previously unknown lake in Borneo, and is a Fellow of the Explorers Club. Best of all, perhaps, he has a mountain named after him outside Angmagssalik, East Greenland. When not on the road, Millman lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Friday, September 9th, 2011
Wood Center Ballroom, 7:00 PM
Free and Open to the Public

CLA's new Dean, Dr. Johnny Payne, will be joined by UAF Press Acquisitions Manager James Engelhardt in a reading of their fiction and poetry.

Friday, September 30, 2011
Wood Center Ballroom, 7:00 PM
Free and Open to the Public

Andrew Porter received his B.A. in English from Vassar College and an M.F.A. in Fiction Writing from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is the author of the short story collection, The Theory of Light and Matter, which won the 2007 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, was published in hardcover in Fall 2008, and was recently republished in paperback by Vintage/Knopf. 

Porter has also received numerous fellowships and awards for his work, including the 2004 W.K. Rose Fellowship in the Creative Arts from Vassar College, a James Michener-Paul Engle Fellowship from the James Michener/Copernicus Foundation, and the Drake Emerging Writer Award from Drake University. He has also had his work read on NPR’s “Selected Shorts”  and selected as one of the 100 Distinguished Stories of 2007 by Best American Short Stories. Currently, Porter lives in San Antonio, where he is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Trinity University.

Andrew Porter's Website

Friday, October 14, 2011
Wood Center Ballroom, 7:00 PM
Free and Open to the Public

November 11th @ The Wood Center Ballroom, 7 PM

Mariela Griffor was born in the city of Concepcion in southern Chile. She attended the University of Santiago and the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. She left Chile for an involuntary exile in Sweden in 1985. She and her American husband returned to the United States in 1998 with their two daughters. They live in Grosse Pointe Park, Michigan. She is co-founder of The Institute for Creative Writers at Wayne State University and Publisher of Marick Press. Her work has appeared in periodicals across Latin America and the United States. Mariela Holds a B.A in Journalism and a M.F.A. in Creative Writing from New England College. She is the author of Exiliana (Luna Publications) and House (Mayapple Press).She is Honorary Consul of Chile in Michigan.

http://marielagriffor.com/

February 3rd @ The Wood Center Ballroom, 7 PM

Nicole Stellon O'Donnell is a poet and essayist who lives in Fairbanks, Alaska with her husband and two daughters. Her poetry has appeared in various literary magazines, including Ice Floe, The Women's Review of Books, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Prairie Schooner. Her essays and reviews have appeared in Anchorage Daily News and as commentaries for the Alaska Public Radio Network. With the support of a grant from the Rasmuson Foundation, she's currently working on a book of persona poems about the life of Sarah Ellen Gibson, who in 1903 decided to start her life over in Fairbanks.

http://www.literarymama.com/profile.php?author=nicole-stellon-odonnell

March 9th @ The Wood Center Ballroom, 7 PM

SARAH GORHAM is a poet, essayist, and publisher who resides in Prospect KY. She was born in Santa Monica, California in 1954. She received her MFA from the University of Iowa in 1978 and her BA in 1976 from Antioch College.

Four Way Books will publish her fourth collection of poetry, Bad Daughter, in 2011. The press also published her third collection, The Cure (2003) and her second, The Tension Zone (1996), which won the 1994 Four Way Books Award in Poetry, judged by Heather McHugh. Her debut volume, Don’t Go Back to Sleep, appeared from Galileo Press in 1989. She co-edited the anthology Last Call: Poems on Alcoholism, Addiction, and Deliverance, with Jeffrey Skinner, published in 1997 by Sarabande Books.

Gorham’s poems have been published widely in Best American Poetry, Poetry, The Nation, Antaeus, American Poetry Review, The Gettysburg Review, Grand Street, DoubleTake, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, Ohio Review, Georgia Review, Southern Review, Missouri Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry Northwest, where she won the Carolyn Kizer Award. Her essays have appeared in The Iowa Review, AGNI, AGNI Online, Pleiades, Gulf Coast, Quarterly West, Poets and Writers, Fourth Genre, Creative Nonfiction, Real Simple, and Arts & Letters. In 2002, she and her husband Jeffrey Skinner served as poets-in-residence at the James Merrill House in Stonington, Connecticut. Other awards include grants and fellowships from The Kentucky State Arts Council, The Kentucky Foundation for Women, The Delaware State Arts Council, The Connecticut Commission on the Arts, Yaddo, MacDowell, Vermont Studio Center, and the VCCA. She received the Gertrude Claytor Prize from the Poetry Society of America and won the Prairie Schooner Reader’s Choice Award.

http://www.sarahgorham.net/

March 30th @ The Wood Center Ballroom, 7 PM

Professor G. C. Waldrep (Ph.D., Duke University; MFA, University of Iowa) is an Assistant Professor of English. He is the author of three full-length collections of poems: Goldbeater's Skin (2003); Disclamor (2007); and Archicembalo (2009), winner of the Dorset Prize. His work has appeared in many journals, including Poetry, Ploughshares, Harper's, The Nation, Kenyon Review, Boston Review, New England Review, Colorado Review, New American Writing, and Tin House, as well as in Best American Poetry 2010. His work has earned prizes and residencies from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the North Carolina Arts Council, and the Campbell Corner Foundation. He was a 2007 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in Literature. Waldrep is also the author of Southern Workers and the Search for Community, a historical monograph on the lives of Southern textile workers during the early twentieth century. At Bucknell he teaches creative writing, directs the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets, and serves as Editor-at-Large for the Kenyon Review.
 
Waldrep's fourth poetry collection, Your Father on the Train of Ghosts--in collaboration with John Gallaher--is due out from BOA Editions in April 2011. He is also co-editing two anthologies, one on the life and work of Paul Celan and the other on postmodern approaches to the pastoral in contemporary poetry.

April 6th @ The Wood Center Ballroom, 7 PM

Steve Almond is the author the story collections My Life in Heavy Metal and The Evil B.B. Chow, the novel Which Brings Me to You (with Julianna Baggott), and the non-fiction books Candyfreak and (Not That You Asked). His new book, Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life, will be out in Spring 2010. He is also, crazily, self-publishing a book called This Won't Take But a Minute, Honey, which is composed of 30 very brief stories, and 30 very brief essays on the psychology and practice of writing.

http://www.stevenalmond.com/

April 20th @ The Wood Center Ballroom, 7 PM

Dana Spiotta graduated from the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington in 1993.

Scribner published her first novel, Lightning Field, in 2001. The Los Angeles Times called it “The hippest, funniest, most urbane and heartfelt account of life west of the 101 and north of the 10 to come along in years.” It was a New York Times Notable Book of the year, and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the West.

Her second novel, Eat the Document, was published in 2006 by Scribner. It was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Award and a recipient of the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The New York Times called Eat The Document “stunning” and described it as “a book that possesses the staccato ferocity of a Joan Didion essay and the razzle-dazzle language and the historical resonance of a Don DeLillo novel.”

Dana Spiotta was a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 2007-2008. She was a Fellow of the New York Foundation for the Arts for 2008. The American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy in Rome awarded her the 2008-2009 Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize. She is living at the American Academy in Rome until the summer of 2009.

Stone Arabia is the title of Spiotta’s third novel.  Scribner will publish it in July of 2011.

http://www.danaspiotta.com/

*****NOTE: READING LOCATIONS ARE SUBJECT TO CHANGE.*****