Spalding University Preview November 5th at 1 pm
Bring your friends and family and tour the campus, learn about majors, activities, scholarships, and financial aid. Meet with Admissions staff, Professors, and Coaches.
To register, please call 502-585-9911 or email admissions@spalding.edu. Check in begins at 12:30 pm in the Egan Leadership Center located at 901 S. 4th St.
Spalding University’s Festival of Contemporary Writing, the state’s largest fall-spring reading series, will be held November 12-18, featuring readings by faculty, guests, and alumni of Spalding University’s brief-residency Master of Fine Arts in Writing program. All readings are free, ticketless, and open to the public.
This year marks the tenth anniversary of the program. A reading at 3:30 p.m. Sunday, November 13, serves as part of the birthday celebration, with reception and cake-cutting to follow.
Festival of Contemporary Writing events will be held at Spalding’s Egan Leadership Center lectorium, located at the corner of Fourth and Breckinridge streets, and at the Brown Hotel (335 W. Broadway) as noted. Plenty of free parking is available for the campus readings. Authors may or may not read from the work listed below.
5:30-6:45 p.m. Saturday, November 12 (ELC Lectorium)
• Helena Kriel (screenwriting), Skin
• John Pipkin (fiction), Woodsburner
• Joyce McDonald (writing for children & young adults), Devil on My Heels
• Randall Horton (poetry), The Lingua Franca of Ninth Street
• Dianne Aprile (nonfiction), The Eye Is Not Enough: On Seeing and Remembering
• Kira Obolensky (playwriting), Raskol
3:30-4:45 p.m. Sunday, November 13 (ELC Lectorium)
This reading is part of the MFA Program’s 10th anniversary celebration. A reception and cake-cutting follow.
• Silas House, author (with Neela Vaswani) of Same Sun Here
• Maureen Morehead, author of The Melancholy Teacher
• Eric Schmiedl, playwright of Fishing for Something
• Sena Jeter Naslund, author of Adam & Eve
6:00-7:00 p.m. Sunday, November 13. Celebration of Recently Published Books. (ELC Lectorium)
• Lesléa Newman (writing for children & young adults), Donovan’s Big Day
• K. L. Cook (fiction), Love Songs for the Quarantined
• Robert Finch (nonfiction), A Cape Cod Notebook
• Susan Campbell Bartoletti (writing for children & young adults), Naamah and the Ark at Night
Book signing to follow. Books provided by Follett Bookstore at Spalding University
7:30-8:45 p.m. Monday, November 14 (ELC Lectorium)
• Louella Bryant (fiction; nonfiction), Full Bloom; While in Darkness There Is Light
• Kirby Gann (fiction), Our Napoleon in Rags
• Robin Lippincott (fiction), In the Meantime
• Debra Kang Dean (poetry), author of Precipitates
• Roy Hoffman (nonfiction), Alabama Afternoons: Profiles and Conversations
• Julie Brickman (fiction), What Birds Can Only Whisper
• Charlie Schulman (playwriting, screenwriting), The Fartiste
5:15-6:30 p.m. Tuesday, November 15 (ELC Lectorium)
• Philip F. Deaver (fiction), Silent Retreats
• Molly Peacock (poetry, nonfiction) The Second Blush; The Paper Garden: An Artist Begins Her Life’s Work at 72
• Rachel Harper (fiction), Brass Ankle Blues
• Sam Zalutsky (screenwriting), You Belong to Me
• Eleanor Morse (fiction), An Unexpected Forest
• Luke Wallin (nonfiction), The Everything Guide to Publishing Children’s Books
• Kathleen Driskell (poetry), Seed Across Snow
6:00-7:00 p.m. Friday, November 18, Featured Author (Brown Hotel, Gallery, 16th floor)
• Gregory Orr, author of The Caged Owl: New and Selected Poems and The Blessing: A Memoir
Book signing to follow. Books provided by Carmichael’s Bookstore.
The reading schedule may change without notice. Check the website for updated information: www.spalding.edu/mfa. For more information, call 502-873-4400 or 800-896-8941, ext. 4400 or email mfa@spalding.edu.
Award-winning poet and memoirist Gregory Orr is set to headline the Fall 2011 session of Spalding University’s Festival of Contemporary Writing, Kentucky’s largest and most prestigious spring-fall reading series. Orr’s presentation takes place at 6 p.m. Friday, November 18, in the Gallery on the 16th floor of the Brown Hotel, 335 W. Broadway. The event is free, ticketless, and open to the public.
Orr is the author of ten collections of poetry. His subject matter ranges from death, trauma, and responsibility—when he was 12, Orr accidentally shot and killed his brother while hunting—to earthly and transcendent love, the subject of his two most recent works, How Beautiful The Beloved (Copper Canyon Press, 2009), and Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved (Copper Canyon Press, 2005). His other volumes of poetry include The Caged Owl: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2002) Orpheus and Eurydice (2001); City of Salt (finalist for the LA Times Poetry Prize); We Must Make a Kingdom of It; and The Red House.
Orr’s memoir The Blessing (Council Oak Books, 2002), chronicling his troubled boyhood, was chosen by Publisher’s Weekly as one of the 50 best nonfiction books of 2002. His personal essay This I Believe was broadcast on National Public Radio in 2006 and included in the anthology This I Believe (Holt 2007). His essay about working as a teenager for the Civil Rights movement in the Deep South was selected for The Best American Creative Nonfiction published in 2009. Poetry as Survival (University of Georgia Press 2002), an extended meditation on the dynamics and function of the personal lyric, was described by Adrienne Rich as “a wise and passionate book.”
Orr is the recipient of many awards and fellowships, including an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA Fellowships, and a Rockefeller Fellowship at the Institute for the Study of Culture and Violence. He teaches at the University of Virginia, where he founded the MFA Program in Writing in 1975, and served from 1978 to 2003 as Poetry Editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review. He lives with his wife, the painter Trisha Orr, and their two daughters in Charlottesville, Virginia.
The Festival of Contemporary Writing is part of the brief-residency Master of Fine Arts in Writing Program at Spalding University. Spalding’s brief-residency MFA Program is a four-semester program in creative writing, offering concentrations in fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, writing for children and young adults, playwriting, and screenwriting. Fall and Spring semesters begin in Louisville in November and May, respectively, while a summer semester with residency abroad begins in June or July and is designed to fit teachers’ schedules. For more information, see www.spalding.edu/mfa.
St. Louis, Mo. – The St. Louis Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (SLIAC) has announced the Athletes of the Week for the week of October 3-9
VOLLEYBALL – OFFENSIVE
Spalding University’s Alex Marquardt, a senior from Louisville, Ky. (Atherton), has been named the Volleyball Offensive Player of the Week for the week of October 3-9.
Marquardt, a 6-0 middle hitter, recorded 56 kills and 12 blocks in four matches played last week. She set a school record for kills in a single match with 23 in a 3-1 win (25-23, 23-25, 25-21, 25-22) versus Webster University. She also posted a .381 attack percentage in that match and posted two block solos and two block assists.
Marquardt recorded 15 kills and three block assists in a 3-2 loss (25-22, 21-25, 27-25, 26-28, 13-15) to Greenville College. She had six kills and four block solos earlier in the week as the Golden Eagles lost to non-conference opponent Oakland City University 3-1 (18-25, 11-25, 25-20, 25-27), and she added eight kills, one block solo and one block assist in a 3-1 non-conference loss (23-25, 25-23, 24-26, 21-25) to McKendree University
The School of Liberal Studies will welcome John Henry Gonzalez Duque on Monday, October 17th as part of the series of events around this year’s theme of social justice.
Monday, October 17
10 – 11:15 am and 12:45 – 2 pm
Spalding University
Egan Leadership Center (ELC) Lectorium
(SE corner of 4th and Breckinridge)
The speaker is a human rights activist and community organizer from Colombia. He is traveling all over the southeast United States as part of a Witness for Peace speaking tour. Mr. Gonzalez will be speaking at 10 and again at 12:45, to coincide with the 9:50 and 12:30 class times.
This is a great opportunity for students, faculty, and staff to hear about important and timely issues from someone with first-hand experience. Just this week, Congress is debating the Colombian Free Trade Agreement, and the effects of that debate will greatly impact the lives of American and Colombian workers and farmers. Mr. Gonzalez has a wealth of experience with that specific issue as well as many others related to social justice. Additionally, there are travel and career opportunities available through Witness for Peace that will interest students.
Information about Witness for Peace as well as videos and reports on Colombia, free trade, and other issues can be found at www.witnessforpeace.org. If you would like additional educational resources please contact Chris Kolb (see contact information below).
Contact Person
Chris Kolb
o: 502-873-4432
c: 502-403-7213
e: ckolb@spalding.edu
Spalding’s Brief-Residency Master of Fine Arts in Writing Program Celebrates Its 10th Birthday, Announces Gift
Spalding University’s brief-residency Master of Fine Arts in Writing Program celebrates its 10th birthday with a party, reading, and announcement of a donor gift at 3:30 p.m. November 13 in the Egan Leadership Center, 901 S. Fourth Street, Louisville, Kentucky.
The celebration features 10-minute readings by faculty members: acclaimed Appalachian author Silas House, Kentucky Poet Laureate Maureen Morehead, award-winning playwright Eric Schmiedl, and Program Director Sena Jeter Naslund. Spalding University President Tori Murden McClure, herself an alumna of the MFA program, will make remarks.
Media welcome. McClure, Naslund, House, Morehead, Schmiedl will be available for interviews 3:00-3:30 p.m.
A panel of alumni will speak briefly. Panelists include J. Terry Price (fiction), president of the Spalding MFA alumni association; Frank X. Walker (poetry), author of Isaac Murphy: I Dedicate This Ride; Diana M. Raab (creative nonfiction), author of Healing with Words: A Writer’s Cancer Journey, and Kelly Creagh (writing for children and young adults), author of the Nevermore young-adult fantasy trilogy.
In addition, Raab will be recognized for a monetary gift to the program to fund a lecture series beginning in May 2012. Each spring, a major author will be named The Diana M. Raab Distinguished Writer in Residence at Spalding University. The author will present a public lecture at Spalding and meet privately with Spalding MFA students and faculty. The recipient for Spring 2012 is to be announced at a later date. Raab was a member of the Spalding MFA program’s first incoming class in 2001.
A reception and cake-cutting begins at 4:45 p.m. in the Egan lobby. Afterward, guests are invited to stay for the program’s semiannual Celebration of Recently Published Books, featuring Spalding MFA faculty members, beginning at 6:00 p.m. Featured authors include K.L. Cook (Love Songs for the Quarantined, a collection of short stories), Lesléa Newman (Donovan’s Big Day, a picture book), Robert Finch (A Cape Cod Notebook, a collection of essays), and Susan Campbell Bartoletti (Naamah and the Ark at Night, a picture book). Cook, Newman, Finch, and Bartoletti will sign books afterward. Book sales will be handled by Follett Bookstore.
The birthday celebration and readings are free and open to the public. No tickets are required. Parking is available nearby.
WHO:
Tori Murden McClure, M.Div., J.D., M.F.A., President, Spalding University, author of A Pearl in the Storm: How I Found My Heart in the Middle of the Ocean
Sena Jeter Naslund, Ph.D., Program Director, Spalding University’s brief-residency Master of Fine Arts in Writing Program
Silas House, acclaimed Appalachian author and Spalding MFA faculty member
Maureen Morehead, Kentucky Poet Laureate and Spalding MFA faculty member
Eric Schmiedl, award-winning playwright and Spalding MFA faculty member
WHEN: November 13, 2011.
Remarks, gift announcement, and reading at 3:30 p.m. Cake cutting at 4:45. Celebration of Recently Published Books at 6:00 p.m., with book signing to follow. Books provided for sale by Follett Bookstore.
WHERE: Egan Leadership Center, 901 S. Fourth Street.
Free parking is available in Egan Leadership Center lot, off Fourth Street.
WHY: In October 2001, Program Director Sena Naslund and Administrative Director Karen Mann launched the brief-residency MFA in Writing program. It was a nervous time, just a month after the September 11 terrorist attacks, and Naslund and Mann were uncertain whether the 40 enrolled students would still be willing to board planes to travel—some from as far as California and Alaska—to Spalding, not knowing what the as-yet-untested program would hold. Despite the founders’ concerns, all 40 students and eight faculty members made the trip, coming together for the first of the program’s intensive 10-day residencies. “Our goal was to create a superior, innovative creative writing program of national importance. We wanted the Spalding MFA to be intellectually stimulating and emotionally supportive—a uniquely wonderful place to work and study,” Naslund said.
Since the program launched, the number of low-residency MFA in Writing programs in the U.S. has jumped from five to about fifty, and Poets & Writers magazine has named the Spalding program a Top Ten low-residency MFA in Writing program every year since it began ranking low-residency programs in 2010. In the low-residency model, each semester begins with a residency in which students and faculty come together for workshops, lectures, and other curriculum; students are paired individually with faculty mentors and complete the rest of the semester in independent study conducted at home.
Since the first class entered the program in 2001, the program has quadrupled in size. Current enrollment stands at 167. Screenwriting and playwriting have been added to the original areas of fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and writing for children and young adults. In 2007, the program added a summer semester with residency abroad. The program has graduated 381 students from 40 states as well as several foreign countries. Alumni and current students have published or produced more than 240 books, films, and plays.
Alumni Reunion is this weekend! Don’t miss your chance to register for this weekend’s events.
