Creative Writing Symposium to be held April 8-9
Two writers of national prominence will give readings and present craft talks as part of Morehead State University’s 
Department of English, Foreign Languages and Philosophy’s second annual Creative Writing Symposium on Wednesday and Thursday, April 8 and 9.
Novelist A.J. Verdelle (The Good Negress) and poet and fiction writer Nikky Finney (The World is Round) will read excerpts from their work at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, in room 2 of Breckinridge Hall, followed by a reception and book signing. Thursday’s event will be held from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. in room 312 of the Adron Doran University Center. All events are free and open to the public.
Finney will present “The Historical Sacred” at 9 a.m. followed by Verdelle’s “The Power of the Present Tense” at 10:30 a.m.
The symposium will close with a question and answer session on “Writing Now: The Fine Art of Making Literature in the 21st Century.”
Verdelle has received the Vursell Distinguished Fiction Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; Whiting Award in fiction, has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award; Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and the IMPAC/Dublin International Book Prize. She currently teaches in the Summer Program at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provin
cetown and previously taught at Princeton University and the MFA Program at Vermont College. She is currently a member of the MFA faculty at Lesley University in Cambridge, Mass.
Finney is the author of the short story collection “Heartwood,” and “On Wings Made of Gauze, Rice” (winner of a PEN American Open Book Award) and “The World is Round” (winner of the 2004 Benjamin Franklin Award for Poetry). She is a recipient of the Kentucky Foundation for Women Artists Fellowship Award and most recently edited “The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South” (University of Georgia Press).
Finney, a professor of creative writing at the University of Kentucky, is on the faculty of Cave Canem, the writer’s center for African-American poets. She is a founding member of the Affrilachian Poets and is in her second year as the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence at Smith College in North Hampton, Mass.
The MSU Reading Series is sponsored by MSU Arts and Humanities Council, the Caudill College of Humanities, Department of English, Foreign Languages and Philosophy, Kentucky Folk Art Center, Buckner and Sally S. Hinkle Endowment for Humanities, Morehead State Public Radio, Thomas and Lille D. Chaffin Endowment, Multicultural Student Services, and Interdisciplinary Women’s Studies.
Additional information is available by contacting the Department of English, Foreign Languages and Philosophy at (606) 783-9448 or by e-mailing Crystal Wilkinson at c.wilkinson@moreheadstate.edu.
Posted: 3-26-09
