Writing for a Living in Central Arkansas
A Panel Discussion Featuring Editors
Bobby Ampezzan, Annie Berman, and Eliza Borne
Tuesday, March 18, 2014 @ 6:00 p.m.
RJ Wills Lecture Hall, Campus Center,
Pulaski Tech Main Campus
Big Rock Reading Series
Hosted by the English Department at Pulaski Technical College, North Little Rock, AR
Thursday, February 20, 2014
Wednesday, February 5, 2014
Jericho Brown! Thursday Night! February 6, 2014!
We've been hit by winter pretty hard this year, and this week in particular. I'm happy to report that the forecast calls for no major snow, ice, or rain for Jericho Brown's visit. It will be cold, but the poetry will warm you up! Hope to see you soon.
Jericho Brown
Thursday, February 6, 2014 @ 6:00 p.m.
RJ Wills Lecture Hall, Campus Center
Pulaski Technical College, North Little Rock
Free and Open to the Public
Jericho Brown
Thursday, February 6, 2014 @ 6:00 p.m.
RJ Wills Lecture Hall, Campus Center
Pulaski Technical College, North Little Rock
Free and Open to the Public
Thursday, January 16, 2014
Spring 2014 Kickoff with Jericho Brown!
Jericho Brown, February 6, 2014
6:00 p.m., RJ Wills Lecture Hall, Campus Center
Pulaski Technical College, North Little Rock Campus
Jericho Brown is the recipient of fellowships from the
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the National
Endowment for the Arts. His first book, PLEASE, won the American Book Award, and
his second book, THE NEW TESTAMENT,
is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press. Poems have appeared or are
forthcoming in journals and anthologies including, Callaloo, The
Nation, The New Yorker, Oxford American, The New Republic,
100 Best African American Poems, Ascent of Angles, and The
Best American Poetry. Brown is currently an Assistant Professor at Emory
University.
Brown strives to be clear—not
obvious. He is neither afraid of nor married to difficulty or accessibility. He
means to write poems that are felt before they are understood. He thinks
of writing, first, as a process of listening to some series of sounds that
enter his mind and, second, as a process of embodying those sounds.
Because he's so interested in both music and voice, he finds himself
trying to figure the personality of the sounds as he is composing.
Thursday, October 17, 2013
Friday, August 16, 2013
Fall 2013 Lineup
The Big Rock Reading series has an exciting lineup for Fall 2013. All events are free and open to the public.
For more information email slonghorn@pulaskitech.edu or call
501-812-2302.
Big Rock Reading Series: Novelist, Garry
Craig Powell
Reading, Q & A, and Book Signing
Tuesday, September 17, 2013, 6:00 p.m.,
RJ Wills Lecture Hall, Campus Center 2nd Floor, Pulaski Technical
College, North Little Rock
Garry Craig Powell's debut, the
novel-in-stories Stoning the Devil
(Skylight Press 2012) has been long-listed for the 2013 Frank O' Connor Short
Story Award. Powell, an Englishman, has degrees from the universities of
Cambridge, Durham, and Arizona, and has taught in Portugal, Spain, Poland, and
the United Arab Emirates, the setting of his book. His stories have appeared in
Best American Mystery Stories,
McSweeney's, Nimrod and other literary journals. He has been awarded
fellowships by the Arkansas Arts Council, the Writers Colony at Dairy Hollow,
and the Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts and Sciences. Powell is an
Associate Professor in the Department of Writing at UCA.
Big Rock Reading Series: Dr. Adam Long
and Dr. Ruth Hawkins
Presentation, Reading, Q & A, and
Book Signing
Thursday, October 24, 2013, 6:00 p.m.,
RJ Wills Lecture Hall, Campus Center 2nd Floor, Pulaski Technical
College, North Little Rock
Adam Long is the
director of the Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum and Educational Center in Piggott,
Arkansas. Originally from Jonesboro, he
has a Ph.D. from the University of Kansas and degrees from the University of
Arkansas at Fayetteville and Lyon College in Batesville. His academic writings
have been published in journals such as Philological
Review and The International Journal
of the Humanities and in a forthcoming volume by the Center for Faulkner
Studies.
Adam Long’s scholarship focuses on the changing South at the
beginning of the Twentieth Century.
Though Ernest Hemingway is not from the South, he visited and wrote in
Arkansas regularly and the prominent Pfeiffer family of Piggott was one of his
greatest influences. Through this
Arkansas connection, Long explores the ways in which the Arkansas Delta (and
the South more generally) was connected to a rapidly changing world in the
1920s and 1930s.
Ruth A. Hawkins is
executive director of Arkansas Heritage Sites at Arkansas State University, including
the Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum and Educational Center at Piggott, the Historic
Dyess Colony: Boyhood Home of Johnny
Cash, and other preservation and heritage tourism projects throughout the
Arkansas Delta. Her book, Unbelievable Happiness and Final Sorrow,
tells the story of the marriage between Ernest Hemingway and Pauline Pfeiffer
of Piggott, Arkansas. Hawkins holds a
Bachelor of Journalism degree from the University of Missouri, a Master's
degree in Political Science from Arkansas State University and a Ph.D. in
Higher Education Administration from the University of Mississippi. She is a
member of the Arkansas History Commission and a state advisor to the National
Trust for Historic Preservation.
Big Rock Reading Series: Diana Reaves and William Pittam
Reading and Q & A
Friday, November 15, 2013,10:00 a.m., RJ
Wills Lecture Hall, Campus Center 2nd Floor, Pulaski Technical
College, North Little Rock
Diana Reaves grew up
in southern Alabama along the muddy banks of the Chattahoochee River, and
before she fell for poetry, she wanted to be a tornado chaser. Reaves says, “I
think those dreams of tracking storms are still very present in what I’m doing
now. I mean, I’m always running after what is both mysterious and real, those
momentary strikes or mile-long paths full of debris, some force we can’t
predict that leaves us in quiet aftermaths of questions and possible answers, a
rotating column of words often violent in some ways but beautiful—poetry.”
Reaves’ poems are about the loss of loved ones, the loss of belief
in those we love, and also about the enduring and sometimes fragile connections
between family and friends. She lives in Fayetteville, AR, where she is the
2013 Walton Fellow in Poetry and the 2013 Lily Peter Fellow in Poetry at the
University of Arkansas. Her poems have appeared in Tar River Poetry, Boxcar
Poetry Review, and The 2River View.
William Pittam is from
Staffordshire, England. He took his MA in Creative Writing at Bath Spa
University, funded by a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. He
is currently in the third year of his MFA at the University of Arkansas and a
recipient of the Walton and Lily Peter Fellowships for Fiction.
Set in the United Kingdom, from London to the
Midlands, William’s short stories take the form of family or marital drama, and
yet also explore philosophical themes, such as belief and the rituals that form
them. In one story about the 2005 London terror attacks, a woman attempts to
understand the concept of martyrdom, the drive for which she views as an
unattainable level of belief. This feeling is complicated, however, when she
meets and begins to fall for a Bosnian man who fought in the Siege of Sarajevo.
Thursday, April 11, 2013
A Taste of Silano & Williams
The Big Rock Reading Series Announces
A Joint Reading
With the Arkansas Literary Festival
Poets Martha Silano and Johnathon Williams
Friday, April 19, 2013 @ 11:00 a.m.
To whet the appetite, we offer poems by Silano and Williams. Hope to see you at the reading.
A
Country Wedding
The JP is drunk, and my father
dying, the embryonic clot
destined for his lungs
already cooing beneath his scarred
left calf.
I wear a T-shirt. Her parents
are late, their stop at the Elks Lodge
extended when the tap struck air.
Moths and mosquito killers
light our vows, their procession
into the bug zapper a parable
of obsession and sacrifice.
Someone’s aunt plays the parlor
piano, middle C lost months ago,
and the tune unnamable.
Hours later, we sit upright
on my twin bed like witnesses
to a car accident where no one
was at fault. A school night, and
tomorrow
we still won’t be allowed to kiss in
the cafeteria,
so we compare notes on two years
of sex in station wagons and
graveyards,
dress her dolls in the diapers
everyone assumed we needed.
Headlights wash the window in bridal
white,
then disappear. We stand as a truck turns
and travels back into its own dusty
wake.
The highway is miles from our dirt
road.
None find it in the dark.
Johnathon Williams, from The Road to Happiness (Antilever Press, 2012)
It's All Gravy
a gravy with little brown specks
a gravy from the juices in a pan
the pan you could have dumped in the sink
now a carnival of flavor waiting to be scraped
loosened with splashes of milk of water of wine
let it cook let it thicken let it be spooned or poured
over bird over bovine over swine
the gravy of the cosmos bubbling
beside the resting now lifted to the table
gravy like an ongoing conversation
Uncle Benny's pork-pie hat
a child's peculiar way of saying emergency
seamlessly with sides of potato of carrot of corn
seamlessly
while each door handle sings its own song
while giant cicadas ricochet off cycads and jellyfish
sting
a gravy like the ether they swore the planets swam through
luminiferous millions of times less dense than air
ubiquitous impossible to define a gravy like the God
Newton paid respect to when he argued
that to keep it all in balance to keep it from
collapsing
to keep all the stars and planets from colliding
sometimes He had to intervene
a benevolent meddling like the hand
that stirs and stirs as the liquid steams
obvious and simple everything and nothing
my gravy your gravy our gravy the cosmological constant's
glutinous gravy an iridescent and variably pulsing gravy
the gravy of implosion a dying-that-births-dueodenoms
gravy
gravy of doulas of dictionaries and of gold
the hand stirs the liquid steams
and we heap the groaning platter with glistening
the celestial chef looking on as we lift our
plates
lick them like a cat come back from a heavenly spin
because there is oxygen in our blood
because there is calcium in our bones
because all of us were cooked
in the gleaming Viking
range
of the stars
Martha Silano, from The Little
Office of the Immaculate Conception (Saturnalia Books 2011).
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