Ibis Literary Reading Series 2014-15

Master Class with Amina Gautier, Benjamin Saenz, and Karen Tei Yamashita
3:30-5:00PM
1252 Memorial Drive
Ashe Building, Room 427
Coral Gables

Reading featuring Amina Gautier, Benjamin Saenz, and Karen Tei Yamashita
7-8:30PM  
1210 Stanford Drive
Wesley Foundation Building
CAS Gallery
Coral Gables

Dr. Amina Gautier is the author of Now We Will Be Happy which won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize and of the short story collection At-Risk which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. More than eighty of her short stories have been published or are forthcoming in journals including Antioch Review, Callaloo, Chattahoochee Review, Crazyhorse, Glimmer Train, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, among others. Gautier’s stories have won the Crazyhorse Fiction Prize, the Danahy Prize, the Jack Dyer Prize, the Lamar York Prize in Fiction, the Schlafly Microfiction Award, and the William Richey Award. She recently joined the fiction faculty at the University of Miami.

Benjamin Alire Saenz is an artist, poet, novelist, and author of children’s books. He has written five books of poetry, four novels, four young adult novels, and four children’s books. His most recent collection of short stories, Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club from Cinco Puntos Press won the PEN Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Lambda Literary Award. His latest Young Adult novel from Simon and Schuster, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, was the winner of the Pura Belpre Award, The Stonewall Award, The Lambda Literary Award and is a Printz Honor Book. He has a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and is currently the chair of the Creative Writing Department at the University of Texas at El Paso.

Karen Tei Yamashita is the author of Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, Brazil-Maru, Tropic of Orange, Circle K Cycles, and I Hotel, all published by Coffee House Press. I Hotel was selected as a finalist for the National Book Award and awarded the California Book Award, the American Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association Award, and the Association for Asian American Studies Book Award. She has been a US Artists Ford Foundation Fellow and is currently Professor of Literature and Creative Writing and the co-holder of the University of California Presidential Chair for Feminist & Critical Race & Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Master Class with Michael Bukard, Staceyann Chin, and Mary Ruefle
3:30-5:00 PM
1252 Memorial Drive
427 Ashe Administration Building
Coral Gables

Thursday, January 15

Reading featuring Michael Bukard, Staceyann Chin, and Mary Ruefle
7-8:30 PM     
1210 Stanford Drive
Wesley Foundation Building
CAS Gallery
Coral Gables

Michael Burkard’s books of poetry include My Secret Boat (W. W. Norton), Entire Dilemma, and Unsleeping (Sarabande Books). His poems appear in many journals and magazines, including The American Poetry Review, Chicago Review, Verse, Fence, and Black Clock. Twice he has received fellowships from both the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Foundation for the Arts. He received the Alice diFay di Castagmola Award from the Poetry Society of America, and he has received a Whiting Writer's Prize. In 2008, Michael Burkard was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. His poetry has appeared in four separate Best Anthologies. He is Associate Professor of English at Syracuse University where he teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing.

Staceyann Chin is a fulltime artist. A resident of New York City and a Jamaican National, she has been an “out poet and political activist” since 1998. From the Nuyorican Poets' Cafe to one-woman shows Off- Broadway to acting in Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe and performing in both the stage and film versions of Howard Zinn’s Voices of a People's History of the United States, to starring in the Tony nominated, Russell Simmons Def Poetry Jam on Broadway, Chin credits the long list of "things she has done" to her grandmother's hard-working history and the pain of her mother's absence.

Mary Ruefle is the author of Trances of the Blast (Wave Books, 2013), Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures (Wave Books, 2012), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and Selected Poems (Wave Books, 2010), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. She has published ten books of poetry, a book of prose (The Most of It, Wave Books, 2008), and a comic book, Go Home and Go to Bed!, (Pilot Books/Orange Table Comics, 2007); she is also an erasure artist, whose treatments of nineteenth century texts have been exhibited in museums and galleries, and published in A Little White Shadow (Wave Books, 2006). Ruefle is the recipient of numerous honors, including the Robert Creeley Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a Whiting Award. She lives in Bennington, Vermont, and teaches in the MFA program at Vermont College.