Axton Reading Series

Department of English reading series featuring distinguished writers

Fall 2014

Nick Flynn

November 2014

Nick Flynn’s most recent book, The Reenactments, which Kirkus calls“a truly insightful, original work,” completes a trilogy begun with Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (2004). His previous book, The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands (2011), was a collection of poems linked to the second book of the trilogy,The Ticking is the Bomb (2010), which the Los Angeles Times called a “disquieting masterpiece.” Another Bullshit Night in Suck City won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, was shortlisted for France’s Prix Femina, and has been translated into fifteen languages. He is also the author of a play, Alice Invents a Little Game and Alice Always Wins (2008), as well as two other books of poetry, Some Ether (2000), and Blind Huber (2002), for which he received fellowships from, among other organizations, The Guggenheim Foundation and The Library of Congress. Some of the venues his poems, essays and non-fiction have appeared in include The New Yorker, the Paris Review, National Public Radio’s This American Life, and The New York Times Book Review. His film credits include artistic collaborator and “field poet” on the film Darwin’s Nightmare (nominated for an Academy Award for best feature documentary in 2006), as well as executive producer and artistic collaborator on Being Flynn, the film version of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (2012, Focus Features, directed by Paul Weitz, starring Robert De Niro, Paul Dano, Julianne Moore, and Lili Taylor). A professor in the creative writing program at the University of Houston, where he teaches each spring, he then spends the rest of the year in (or near) Brooklyn.

Heather Slomski

Heather Slomski

October 2014

Heather Slomski is the author of The Lovers Set Down Their Spoons, winner of the 2014 Iowa Short Fiction Award and forthcoming from the University of Iowa Press. She received her M.F.A. from Western Michigan University and held the Axton Fellowship in Fiction at the University of Louisville. Her stories have appeared in TriQuarterly, American Letters & Commentary, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, The Normal School, and elsewhere. A recipient of a Minnesota State Artist Initiative Grant and a Minnesota Emerging Writers’ Grant, she currently lives in Minnesota with her husband and son and teaches writing at Concordia College.

Chelsey Minnis

Chelsey Minnis

September 2014

Chelsey Minnis graduated from from the University of Colorado, Boulder and has an MFA from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop in poetry. Her first book Zirconia won the Alberta Prize for Women from Fence Press in 2001. Fence Books published her second manuscript Bad Bad in 2007. Her third book Poemland was published by Wave Books in 2009. Her first book Zirconia was described as "accessible, confrontational, hilarious, occasionally shocking, never ever dull and often extremely moving." Her work has been cited as an example of the gurlesque as envisioned by poet Arielle Greenberg. She lives in Boulder, Colorado with her husband Steve.

CREATIVE WRITING PROGRAM

318 D Bingham Humanities

University of Louisville

Louisville, Kentucky 40292

CREATIVE WRITING DIRECTOR

Ian Stansel

ian.stansel@louisville.edu

Phone

tel (502) 852-5921

fax (502) 852-4182

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