by Rod Jones
The faculty and visiting instructors of Oklahoma City University's Red Earth Creative Writing MFA program will present two readings and a storytelling event in July. All three events are free to the public.
Red Earth MFA summer visiting writers will give a reading at 7 p.m. July 12, and faculty members and the visiting writers will present another reading at 7 p.m. July 15 at the Paramount OKC coffee shop and screening room on Film Row.
A storytelling event featuring faculty member Kerry Cohen, Moth performer Lesley Harper and Oklahoma City’s own Molly O’Connor will be at 7 p.m. July 17 at the Back Alley Gallery on N.W. 50th Street and May Avenue.
Authors participating in the faculty and visiting instructors’ reading will be Allison Amend, author of “A Nearly Perfect Copy”; Lou Berney, author of “Whiplash River”; Kat Meads, author of “2:12 a.m. essays” and “For You, Madam Lenin”; Brad McLelland, author of “Bruisers”;Timothy Bradford, author of “Nomads with Samsonite”; and Benjamin Myers, author of “Elegy for Trains”and the current Oklahoma Poet Laureate. The writers, along with Red Earth faculty members Quraysh Ali Lansana, Kat Meads and Jeanetta Calhoun Mish, will be available after the reading for discussions and book signing.
The visiting writers in the program’s current residency are poet and multi-genre fiction writer Jim Daniels and novelist Luke Goebel.
Daniels is the author of 34 publications in several genres — poetry, short fiction, novels and produced screenplays. Daniels’ writing has been awarded several prizes, among them two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the 2014 Michigan Notable Book, 2014 Binghamton University Milt Kessler, Poetry Book Award, Poetry Gold Medal and the 2014 Independent Publisher Book Awards. His work appears in the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. His poem “Factory Love” is displayed on the roof of a race car. Daniels is the Thomas Stockham Baker University Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University.
Goebel’s first novel, “Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours,” was released in September 2014 by FC2 and was the winner of the Ronald Sukenick Prize for Innovative Fiction. He was co-editor for several years with The New York Tyrant and was guest editor for Volume 4 of the journal. He has fictions published in Elimae, Green Mountains Review, Unsaid, Gigantic, Pank, Kitty Snacks, The New York Tyrant and elsewhere. Goebel is an assistant professor of English at the University of Texas at Tyler.
Books will be available for purchase and signing at the readings.
The Red Earth MFA is a low-residency creative writing program. For more information visit the Red Earth MFA website.
