The University of New Hampshire’s Department of English is pleased to announce that poet Elizabeth A. I. Powell and short story writer Jensen Beach will read from their work and hold a Q & A session at 5:00 p.m. on Thursday, April 6, 2017 at the Memorial Union Building, Theatre I, on the Durham Campus, as part of the UNH Writers Series.
Elizabeth A. I. Powell is the author of "The Republic of Self," a New Issue First Book Prize winner, and "Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter: Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances," which won the Robert Dana Prize in poetry. A Pushcart Prize winner, she has received Vermont Council on the Arts grants and a Yaddo fellowship. Her work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Barrow Street, Black Warrior Review, Ecotone, Harvard Review, Handsome, Hobart, Indiana Review, Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, Slope, Sugarhouse Review, Ploughshares, Post Road and elsewhere. UNH poetry professor David Rivard describes her as "mischievous, melancholy, funny, metaphysical and ironic ecstacist, a kind of up-dated Fernando Pessoa." Pulitzer Prize winning poet C.K. Williams says of "The Republic of Self:" "There’s so much right in this book, so much spirit and intelligence and personal and mythic and historical imagination, that its many poetic surprises come to seem absolutely inevitable, its rigor and its hard-earned truths essential, its absolute command of artifice perfectly natural: it’s the kind of book that seems to have always been there, only waiting for us finally to arrive."
Powell is editor of Green Mountains Review and is an associate professor of writing and literature at Johnson State College. She also serves on the faculty of the low-residency M.F.A. in Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska-Omaha and the Vermont College of Fine Arts M.F.A. in Writing and Publishing. Born in New York City, she lives in Vermont with her four children.
Jensen Beach is the author of two story collections, most recently "Swallowed by the Cold." He holds an M.F.A. in fiction from the Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, as well as an M.A. and B.A. in English from Stockholm University. He teaches in the B.F.A. program at Johnson State College, where he is the fiction editor of Green Mountains Review. He is also a faculty member in the M.F.A. Program in Writing and Publishing at Vermont College of Fine Arts. His writing has appeared in Public Space, Cincinnati Review, Fifty-Two Stories, Ninth Letter, the Paris Review and The New Yorker, and online at Tin House, N+1, Kenyon Review and American Short Fiction, among others. Publishers Weekly’s review of "Swallowed By the Cold" said that his "characters’ morally ambiguous actions… simultaneously provoke readers’ judgment and invite compassion." Kirkus Review wrote, “The unexpected convergences and dramatic shifts in fortune of Beach’s characters make for a measured, quietly powerful experience."
Beach has received scholarships from the Napa and Sewanee Writers’ conferences, and is one of the web editors at Hobart. He lives in Vermont with his wife and children.
Events are free and open to the public. For more information, contact the English Department at (603) 862-1313. The UNH Writers Series is made possible through the support of the MacArthur/Simic and Edmund G. Miller Funds and the Ben and Zelma Dorson Family Charitable Foundation.
