Visiting Writers 2012-2013

The events are free and open to the public. For more information, contact Professor Jonathan Fink at jfink@uwf.edu.

February 20, 2013 - Roger Sedarat, Poet and Translator

Roger Sedarat's reading will take place from 7:30-8:30pm (reception at 7:00) on Wednesday, February 20 in the Argo Athletic Club (Building 54/ Room 164).

Roger Sedarat is the author of Dear Regime: Letters to the Islamic Republic, which won Ohio University Press's Hollis Summers' Prize, and Ghazal Games (Ohio UP, 2011). In addition to teaching creative writing (poetry and literary translation) in the MFA program at Queens College, City University of New York, he teaches and writes on such academic interests as 19th and 20th century American literature as well as Middle Eastern-American literature. Currently, Roger is working toward translating a full-length collection of ghazals by the 14th century Sufi Persian poet, Hafez.

March 28, 2013 - Natasha Trethewey, United States Poet Laureate

"An Evening with Natasha Trethewey" will take place at 6:00pm (reception at 5:30pm) on Thursday, March 28 at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognitiion, 40 S. Alcaniz Street, Pensacola. Natasha Trethewey's reading will be part of UWF Downtown.

Natasha Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, in 1966. She earned an M.A. in poetry from Hollins University and M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Massachusetts. Her first collection of poetry, Domestic Work (2000), was selected by Rita Dove as the winner of the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African American poet and won both the 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry. Since then, she has published two more collections of poetry, including Native Guard (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), which received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and Bellocq's Ophelia (2002). Her latest collection of poems, Thrall, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in September of 2012. Trethewey's honors include the Bunting Fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. She is Professor of English at Emory University where she holds the Phillis Wheatley Distinguished Chair in Poetry. In 2012, Trethewey was named the 19th U.S. Poet Laureate by the Library of Congress. (Photo copyright: Joel Benjamin)

April 18, 2013 - Laurie O' Brien Creative Writing Awards/ Troubadour Release Party

The Laurie O'Brien Awards/ Troubadour Release Party will take place from 7:30-8:30pm (reception at 7:00) on Thursday, April 18 in the Argo Athletic Club (Building 54/ Room 164)

The Department of English and World Languages is pleased to sponsor the journal Troubadour and the Laurie O’Brien Creative Writing Awards for undergraduate and graduate students currently enrolled at the University of West Florida. One graduate student and one undergraduate student will be selected for the Laurie O'Brien Creative Writing Awards by a committee of creative writing instructors at UWF. There is no application process for the award. Information about Troubadour, the student-edited literary journal of UWF, is available here.