THE UMAINE NEW WRITING SERIES SPRING 2005

  The Dates    
       
 
20 January
  ELIZABETH WILLIS & PETER GIZZI
 
27 February
  GRADY PRIZE POETRY & PROSE
 
3 February
  LEE ANN BROWN & DANIEL BOUCHARD
 
17 March
LYN HEJINIAN > 8PM Minsky Recital Hall
 
5 April
  JULIANA SPAHR & MARK MCMORRIS
 
14 April
  MICHAEL PALMER
 
21 April
  AMMIEL ALCALAY & WALTER LEW
     
       
     

All events are free and open to the public. • The New Writing Series is supported by the English Department of the University of Maine, the National Poetry Foundation, the Honors College, and grants from the Cultural Affairs Committee. • A map of the University of Maine campus can be found here.
  The Poets    
 
  Elizabeth Willis is the author of three books of poetry. The Human Abstract was selected for the National Poetry Series, and Turneresque recently went into its second printing. A booklength poem, Second Law, was published in 1993. Her poems appear in recent issues of American Poetry Review, The Baffler, Chicago Review, Conjunctions, No, Open City, and Triquarterly. She has been awarded a California Arts Council Fellowship and a Howard Foundation Fellowship for Poetry.
     
 
  Peter Gizzi grew up in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. His poetry collections include Artificial Heart (Burning Deck, 1998); Periplum (Avec, 1992); and Some Values of Landscape and Weather (Wesleyan, 2003). His editing projects have included oblek: a journal of language arts (1987-93), the Exact Change Yearbook (Carcanet, 1995), and The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan, 1998). Currently he teaches and directs the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
     
    Lee Ann Brown is the author of two books of poetry, The Sleep That Changed Everything and Polyverse, and the publisher of Tender Buttons books. Brown teaches at St. Johns University and lives in Manhattan with her husband, the actor Tony Torn, and their daughter Miranda.
     
 
  Daniel Bouchard is the author of Some Mountains Removed and Diminutive Revolutions. He edits The Poker magazine from Cambridge, Massachussets, where he lives with his wife Kate Nugent and works at the MIT Press.
     
 
 

Poet, translator, and essayist Lyn Hejinian is the author of numerous books of poetry—including My Life, Oxota, The Fatalist—as well a collection of essays and poetics statements, The Language of Inquiry. Hejinian has also edited or co-edited Tuumba Press (1976-1984), Poetics Journal (1981-), and Atelos Press. She recently received the sixty-sixth Fellowship from The Academy of American Poets for distinguished poetic achievement at mid-career. She lives in Berkeley, California.
     
 
  A two-time winner of the Contemporary Poetry Series award from the University of Georgia Press, Mark McMorris is the author of four books of poetry: The Café at Light (Roof Books, 2004), The Blaze of the Poui (University of Georgia Press, 2003), The Black Reeds (University of Georgia Press, 1997), and Moth-Wings (Burning Deck, 1996). Born in Kingston, Jamaica, and educated at Columbia and Brown, he is currently an associate professor of English at Georgetown University, and is the former director of the Georgetown Poetry & Seminar Series and the university’s Lannan Fellows Program.
     
 
  Juliana Spahr is the author of Response (Sun & Moon), Fuck You - Aloha - I Love You (Wesleyan), and numerous chapbooks. Her scholarly volume Everybody's Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity was published by the University of Alabama in 2001. She is a founding member of the subpress collective and co-editor, with Jena Osman, of the journal Chain. With Claudia Rankine, she coedited the collection of essays American Women Poets in the Twenty-first Century. Since August 2003, she had been an Assistant Professor at Mills College. Read an interview here.
     
 
  Michael Palmer is the author of numerous books of poetry, including Codes Appearing: Poems 1979-1988 (New Directions, 2001) and The Lion Bridge: Selected Poems 1972-1995 (New Directions, 1998). His honors include two grants from the Literature Program of the National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. In 1999 he was elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. He lives in San Francisco.
     
 
  Ammiel Alcalay's works include from the warring factions (Beyond Baroque, 2002), a booklength poem dedicated to the Bosnian town of Srebrenica, and a translation of Semezdin Mehmedinovic's Nine Alexandrias (City Lights 2003). He is a member of the Medieval Studies and Comparative Literature faculty at the CUNY Graduate Center.
     
 
  Walter K. Lew's most recent book is Treadwinds: Poems and Intermedia Text (Wesleyan, 2002). Earlier books include the acclaimed Asian North American poetry anthology Premonitions and Muae 1 (both published in 1995). Formerly a TV news and documentary producer on events in Korea, Lew was the founding editor of the small press Kaya Production and has staged his own multimedia performance pieces for the Los Angeles Festival and Walker Art Center. He is currently working on a translation with commentary of the selected works of the Korean avant garde author Yi Sang (1910-1937). He has taught at several universities, including Brown, Cornell, and Mills.