Tuesday, January 17, 2012

February Castalia

Get ready for February Castalia! This month we have a full line-up, featuring first year poet Jay Yencich. The second year ladies have a bit of a monopoly, as we'll be hearing from poets Erika Wilder and Katherine Eulensen, as well as prose writer Piper Daniels. We'll get another dose of poetry from alum Emily Beyer. Beyer is a poet living and working in Seattle, Washington. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Iowa and a BA in English from the University of Washington. Her poems have appeared in The Seattle Review, Mare Nostrum, The Diagram, Prairie Schooner, and other publications.

Our featured faculty writer this month is David Shields whose recent book Reality Hunger has put nonfiction on the map and made us reconsider our genre boundaries. He has been hailed by the New York Times as "mind-bending." He has authored eight other books, has been a finalist of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and has won the PEN/Revson Award and the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. This past year he co-edited The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death and he has several books forthcoming. Read more at http://www.davidshields.com/index.html

January Recap

January Castalia rang in the New Year in the best of ways. First year Kristine Greive gave us snippets of a life lived with nausea and a plastic bag always at hand. Fellow first year Matt Perez gave us a moving story based on family experiences. Second year Kate Lebo charmed our ears with her pie poems and our bellies with her warm pie that she served at intermission. Poet and alum Matthew Nienow impressed us after the break with some of his newer work that taught us something about fatherhood and boat-building. Our own Pimone Triplett rounded out the evening with wonderful poems about refrigerators and Now and Laters (or is it Now or Laters?).

Monday, January 2, 2012

Happy New Year!


The Castalia reading series is ringing in the new year with more great poetry and prose on Tuesday January 3rd! Kicking off the January event are first year prose writers Kristine Greive and Matt Perez. Our second year reader is famed pie-poet Kate Lebo. Be sure to bring cash & an appetite because she'll be selling slices of her scrumptious pies tomorrow night, too! For our alum reader this month, we are happy to present poet Matthew Nienow, who has published three chapbooks, including The Folded Map, which came out in 2011. He has received awards from such places as the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Foundation. For our featured faculty reader, we are fortunate to have Professor and Director of the Creative Writing Program: Pimone Triplett. She has published three books of poetry: Rumor in 2009, The Price of Light in 2005, and Ruining the Picture in 1998. She has received the Levis Poetry Prize and the Hazel Hall Poetry Prize, and has also co-edited the collection of essays Poet's Work, Poet's Play.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Castalia Reading Series
Richard Hugo House
8 pm
Tuesday January 3rd, 2012