SMU Literary Festival 2009

     The mission of the SMU Literary Festival is to bring students closer to established writers through both an academic and social forum.  By doing so, we hope to establish the festival as an annual event that will help increase student involvement within the English Department at SMU.

     The SMU Literary Festival will be free and open to University students, faculty, and staff.

Schedule of Events

Thursday, April 16th

     2:00 p.m. - Student luncheon with the Writers (Dallas Hall Reading Room)
 

     4:30 p.m. - Informal Panel Discussion with Melissa Kirsch, Michael Narducci, and April Wilder,
                      Stanley Marcus Reading Room, DeGolyer Library

Friday, April 17th

     5:00 p.m. - Reception, Texana Room, DeGolyer Library

     6:00 p.m. - Tracy Winn reading, Stanley Marcus Reading Room, DeGolyer Library

     7:00 p.m. - Intermission, Texana Room, DeGolyer Library

     7:30 p.m. - Scott Blackwood reading, Stanley Marcus Reading Room, DeGolyer Library

     8:30 p.m. - Festival ends.

Visiting Writers

Scott Blackwood is the author of We Agreed to Meet Just Here, which won the 2007 AWP Award for the Novel and was published in 2009 by New Issues Press. His award-winning collection of stories, In the Shadow of Our House, was published by SMU Press in 2001. His fiction has appeared most recently in American Short Fiction, the Gettysburg Review, Boston Review and Southwest Review, and the title story from his collection is featured on the New York Times Book Review's "First Chapters" website. His essays and reviews have appeared in the Austin Chronicle, Austin American-Statesman, Bookslut.com, and in Revenant Record's NPR-featured American Primitive Volume II. He's received a Dobie Paisano Fellowship, and two Texas Commission on the Arts Fellowships. He currently teaches in and directs the MFA Creative Writing Program at Roosevelt University in Chicago.

Melissa Kirsch is the author of “The Girl’s Guide to Absolutely Everything” (Workman, 2007), now in its fourth printing. In addition to writing nonfiction, Melissa has published poems in Indiana Review, Northwest Review, Fence, Nerve, Meridian, Poetry Daily and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from the Camargo Foundation and Château de La Napoule in France and the Fundación Valparaíso in Spain. Melissa lives in New York City, where she writes for such publications as New York, Good Housekeeping, National Geographic Traveler, Scientific American and The Huffington Post. You can find her online at http://www.melissakirsch.com.

Michael Narducci graduated from Harvard University in 1997 and received an MFA from The University of Virginia, where he was a Henry Hoyns Fellow. His short fiction has appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review, Gadfly Magazine, Meridian, and The Texas Review. After teaching creative writing at the Idyllwild Arts Academy in Southern California for seven years, he moved to Los Angeles to pursue work as a television and film writer. He has since written for the science fiction series THE 4400 as well as the NBC drama MEDIUM.

April Wilder is a former McCreight Fellow of the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. She holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Montana, and is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Utah, where she holds the Vice-Presidential Fellowship in Creative Writing. Her fiction has appeared in Zoetrope, McSweeney's, Guernica, and other publications. She's currently working on a novel, "I Think About You All The Time, Starting Tomorrow." She lives in Salt Lake City.

Tracy Winn, who earned her MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers, is the recipient of grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Barbara Deming Memorial Trust, and the Arch and Bruce Brown Foundation, and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Millay Colony. Her short stories have appeared in journals such as the Alaska Quarterly Review, The New Orleans Review, and Hayden¹s Ferry Review. She lives near Boston, Massachusetts, with her husband and daughter, and works with Gaining Ground, an organic farm for hunger relief. Mrs. Somebody Somebody is her debut collection of stories.

Event Parking

General parking is available for our guests in the highlighted visitor parking areas on our campus map.

Printable *.pdf parking permits will be available for guests who have special parking needs.  To request a printable permit, please contact Brooke Guelker at bguelker@smu.edu no later than noon on Friday, April 3, 2009.  Please note that you will need a valid e-mail address so that the permit can be e-mailed back to you.

Contact Us

For more information regarding the Literary Festival, please contact Ben Painter, festival coordinator, via e-mail bpainter@smu.edu or telephone (570) 259-8275.

The English Department is located at 3225 University Blvd., Dallas Hall 5, Dallas, TX 75205.

The DeGolyer Library is located at 6404 Hilltop Lane, Dallas, TX 75205.