Fall 2018

Women in Publishing Workshop

Monday, October 1 – Wednesday, October 3
5:00 – 7:30 p.m.
WSU-Pullman Campus
Asia Pacific House, 905 C Street

Literary Speaking Agent Vaughan Ashlie Fielder/ Book Editor Carey Salerno/ North American Review Editor Rachel Morgan will conduct a workshop where students can gain substantial editing and publishing experience. The workshop will include but is not limited to discussion, writing exercises, and mock-job interviews.

Vaughan Ashlie Fielder will discuss building a career as a literary speaking agent. She will walk students through the day-to-day operations of running a business and the challenges of keeping an agency small and personal as opposed to going corporate. Carey Salerno will discuss independent publishing, submitting work, and working with an editor. She will share guidance on the various steps, including book contracts, marketing, publicity, and book tours. She may also discuss the publishing profession and how to “break in.” Rachel Morgan will discuss the nuances of being a genre editor at North American Review, including guidance on managing submissions, interacting with authors, and layout as well as the importance of keeping up with current trends in literary publishing in the digital age.

Open to students of all majors, the course includes three nights of hands-on workshop/instruction. To enroll, contact Leisa McCormick (lmccormick@wsu.edu) in Avery Hall 202.

Vaughan Ashlie Fielder is the Founder of the The Field Office. She served as the Associate Director of the Kentucky Women Writers Conference from 2007-2012, a role in which she co-facilitated a city-wide literary festival. She began her work advocating for Nikky Finney in 2011, work that led to her creation of The Field Office, a new kind of Poet’s agency. Vaughan is also a mother to a strong-willed daughter and a resident of Lexington, Kentucky, where she grows a backyard garden of lilacs, butterfly bushes, peonies, lavender, and gourds, each chosen by Field Office Poets.

Carey Salerno is the executive editor of Alice James Books, author of Shelter (2009), and coeditor of Lit From Inside: 40 Years of Poetry from Alice James Books (2013). She teaches for the University of Maine at Farmington and currently serves as a literary curator for Pen + Brush, an international nonprofit organization offering an outlet for women in both the literary and visual arts in the city of New York. Salerno has taught or lectured on poetry and editing at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Butler University, Drew University, Colrain Poetry Manuscript Conference, Pine Manor College, The Writer’s Hotel, the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance events, and The New School.

Rachel Morgan is the author of the chapbook, Honey & Blood, Blood & Honey (Final Thursday Press 2017). She is a co-editor of Fire Under the Moon: An Anthology of Contemporary Slovene Poetry (Black Dirt Press) and her work is included in the anthology, Fracture: Essays, Poems, and Stories on Fracking in America (Ice Cube Press 2016). She was a semi-finalist for 2016 Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Contest. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Currently she teaches at the University of Northern Iowa and is the Poetry Editor for the North American Review.

Poetry Reading, Rachel Morgan

Tuesday, October 2
12:15 – 1:00 p.m.
WSU-Pullman Campus, Bundy Reading Room, Avery Hall

Rachel Morgan’s visit is co-sponsored by the Common Reading Program.

*
Spring 2019

Material Comix Workshop

Wednesday February 13 – Friday February 15
5:30-8:30 p.m.
WSU-Pullman Campus, Bundy Reading Room, Avery Hall

Inspired by the counter-cultural and DIY roots of comics and zine-making, Mita Mahato, comix artist and poet, will guide students through a series of creative exercises involving collage, collaboration, and story-building. Focusing on the idea of materiality, the class will craft a number of comics forms while reflecting upon the materials that go into making comics, the materiality or substance of the comics page, and the personal or political materials that comics writers and artists take up as their subjects. No drawing experience is required. To enroll, contact Leisa McCormick (lmccormick@wsu.edu) in Avery Hall 202.

Poetry Comix Presentation, Mita Mahato

Thursday, February 14
3:00-4:00 p.m.
WSU-Pullman Campus, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art

Mita Mahato is a cut paper, comics, and collage artist whose work explores loss by engaging the transformative capacities of found and handmade papers. A selection of her poetry comics, collectively titled In Between, was published by Pleiades Press in 2017. Her book Sea was recognized by Cartoonists NW as 2015’s “best comic book,” and her comics art has been exhibited in galleries across the country. In 2017, she served as the first Artist-in-Residence at the School of Medicine at UC Riverside. She is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Puget Sound, serves on the board for the arts organization Short Run Seattle as well as the steering committee for Graphic Medicine, and is a teaching artist with the Henry Art Gallery.

Mita Mahato’s visit is co-sponsored by the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art and the Common Reading Program.

Fiction Reading, Crystal Wilkinson

April 4
WSU-Pullman Campus

Crystal Wilkinson is a fiction writer whose 2016 novel The Birds of Opulence was the winner of the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. Blackberries, Blackberries was a winner of the 2002 Chaffin Award for Appalachian Literature, and Water Street was a finalist for both the UK’s Orange Prize for Fiction and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. She is also the winner of the Sallie Bingham Award from the Kentucky Foundation for Women. She currently teaches in and directs the BFA in Creative Writing Program at Morehead State University.