The Anne & William Axton Reading Series

The Anne and William Axton Reading Series was established in 1999 through the generosity of the late William Axton, former University of Louisville English professor, and his wife, the late Anne Axton. The Series brings highly distinguished writers from across the country to the University of Louisville for two-day visits to read from their work, and to share their knowledge and expertise with the University and Louisville community. On Belknap Campus, writers give a public reading and Q&A on the first day, and on the following morning they conduct a master class where select student work is critiqued. Both events are free, and the public is encouraged to attend.

Previous seasons have included Terrance Hayes, Junot Diaz, Brian Teare, Robert Pinsky, Charles Wright, Nathaniel Mackey, Susan Minot, Mary Karr, Stephen Dobyns, Lynnell Edwards, Colson Whitehead, Robin Lippincott, Robert Hass, Silas House, Beverly Lowry, George Saunders, and Louise Glück. 

The Fall 2011 Series will include Adam McOmber, Derek Mong, Suzanne Buffam, and Srikanth Reddy...

Adam McOmber-   

Adam McOmber’s first book, This New And Poisonous Air, is forthcoming from BOA Editions in June, 2011.  His debut novel, Empyrean, will be published by Touchstone, an imprint of Simon and Schuster, in August 2012.  His work has appeared in Conjunctions, StoryQuarterly, Third Coast, Quarterly West, The Greensboro Review, Arts and Letters and Ascent.  He has been nominated for two 2012 Pushcart Awards and received an AWP Intro Award.  He lives in Chicago and teaches at Columbia College where he is also the associate editor of the literary magazine Hotel Amerika.

 Adam's schedule:

Reading 9/15, 4:30pm, Bingham Poetry Room, Ekstrom Library

Master class 10am-noon, 9/16, Bingham Humanities Room 300

 Alyssa Knickerbocker-   

Alyssa Knickerbocker received her MFA in fiction from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is currently the Axton Fellow at the University of Louisville. Her work has appeared in Brooklyn Magazine, The Bat City Review, Meridian, Sou'wester, Avery Anthology and others and has been anthologized in The Best of the West 2011: New Stories from the West Side of the Missouri. Her novella, “Your Rightful Home,” was published by Flatmancrooked in 2009 and is now available as an e-book from Nouvella. She is completing a collection of short stories linked by the geography of the San Juan Islands in Washington State, where she lived for many years. She lives in Louisville with her husband and son.

 Alyssa's schedule:

Reading 10/6, 7:30pm, Bingham Poetry Room, Ekstrom Library

Derek Mong-  

Derek Mong was the 2008 – 2010 Axton Fellow in Poetry at the University of Louisville, where he taught literature, creative writing, and hosted “The Soul That Grows in Darkness: The Axton Festival of Film and Verse.”  From 2006 – 2007 he was the Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and has previously taught at the University of Michigan, SUNY-Albany, and with young writer’s workshops at Kenyon College and Denison University, his alma mater. While living in the Berkshires he held classes at Edna St. Vincent Millay’s home in Austerlitz, New York.  In the fall of 2010 he began a PhD in English Literature at Stanford University.

His awards include The Missouri Review’s Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Choice Prize, two Pushcart nominations, Alehouse’s Happy Hour Poetry Award, and two Hopwoods. His poems, translations, and prose have appeared in The Southern Review, Crazyhorse, The Kenyon Review, The Michigan Quarterly Review, TriQuarterly, Colorado Review, Court Green, and Breathe: 101 Contemporary Odes (C & R Press, 2009). He holds an MFA from The University of Michigan. In 2011 Saturnalia Books will publish his debut collection, Other Romes.

Born in Portland, Oregon, and raised outside of Cleveland, Ohio, he currently lives with his wife, the translator Anne O. Fisher, in San Francisco. Together they are translating the selected poems of Maxim Amelin (Russian, b. 1970), tentatively titled The Joyous Science.  This project was awarded a 2010 NEA grant for Literary Translation.  In September 2010 he and Annie became parents of a newborn son. 

 Derek's Schedule:

Reading 10/27, 7:30pm, Bingham Poetry Room, Ekstrom Library

Suzanne Buffam and Srikanth Reddy-   

Suzanne Buffam was born and raised in Montreal, Canada. She earned an MA in English from Concordia University and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her poetry collections include Past Imperfect (2005) and The Irrationalist (2010). She has received the CBC Literary Award for Poetry and the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award.

Reviewing The Irrationalist for TheStar.com, poetry columnist Barbara Carey commented that Buffam “rummages in metaphysics and skeptically eyes received wisdom […] occasionally upending it altogether.” Gilliam Jerome, writing of Past Imperfect in Canadian Literature, identified “a speaker self-consciously wary of mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.”

Buffam teaches at the University of Chicago.

Srikanth Reddy grew up in Chicago. He earned an AB from Harvard College, an MFA in creative writing from the University of Iowa, and a PhD in English literature from Harvard University. He is the author of the collection of poems Facts for Visitors (2004).

Reddy employs a variety of forms, including syllabics, terza rima, and the prose poem; his poems are collagelike in their variety and inclusiveness. Facts for Visitors was in part composed when Reddy was away from home, and in an interview he described the book as being about the idea of home. Matthew Miller, reviewing the collection for Double Room on webdelsol.com, observed: “Reddy’s gravitational center is Southern India, but the poet’s collecting gaze circles out to Europe and further west, involving a host of references.”

Reddy’s awards include fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and the Mellon Foundation. His poems have appeared in the anthologies Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation (2004) and Isn’t It Romantic: 100 Love Poems by Younger American Poets (2004).

Reddy is the literacy director for the Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Trust in Bhimavaram, Andhra Pradesh, India. He teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Chicago.

 Buffam and Reddy's Schedule:

Reading 11/10, 7:30pm, Bingham Poetry Room, Ekstrom Library

Master class 10am-noon, 11/11, Bingham Humanities Room 300

Spring Axton Series

The Axton Reading Series Committee is in discussion with a number of notable writers for the Spring 2012 series. More information will be posted shortly.  Please check back with us!