Events

Charles Baxter is the author of seven novels, including the most recent Blood Test: a Comedy, published by Pantheon in 2024, and six story collections; the most recent There’s Something I Want You to Do was a finalist for the Story Prize in 2016. He has also edited or co-edited several books, and published essays on fiction collected in Burning Down the House (Graywolf), Beyond Plot, and Wonderlands: Essays on the Life of Fiction (2022). He now lives in Minneapolis and was the Edelstein-Keller Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, and Harper’s, among other journals and magazines. His fiction has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories seven times, eleven times in The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and translated into many languages.

This event is colloquium credit eligible. Register HERE for Zoom livestream. 

Sidik Fofana will discuss narrative literary techniques gleaned from Kendrick Lamar, Eminem, Noname, and The Notorious B.I.G. and others.

Fofana is a graduate of NYU’s MFA program and a public school teacher in Brooklyn. His work has appeared in the Sewanee Review and Granta. He was also named a fellow at the Center for Fiction in 2018. His debut short story collection was published by Scribner in August 2022.

This event is colloquium credit eligible. Register HERE for the Zoom livestream. 

To prescribe a set method for poetic closure is to deny that any good poem creates a distinct relationship with its reader that it must therefore conclude on its own terms. A poem can strand its reader at an intersection or slam its door in the reader’s face. Some poems lead their readers right back through the doors they initially entered. Other poems shut their doors quietly behind them, while others still prefer to leave their doors slightly ajar. This seminar will explore a number of poems that employ closure as a means to invite the reader to re-enter, revisit and ultimately re-envision the preceding body of the text. How, as writers, can we move our readers into regions of awareness that lie beyond mere epiphany?

Cate Marvin teaches poetry writing in the Stonecoast M.F.A. Program at the University of Southern Maine and is Professor of English at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York. A 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, she lives in Scarborough, Maine. Event Horizon, her fourth collection, appeared from Copper Canyon Press in 2022.

This event is colloquium credit eligible. Register HERE for the Zoom livestream.