Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey and recent Indiana poet laureate Norbert Krapf will be featured during the seventh annual Scissortail Creative Writing Festival April 5 – 7 [THURSDAY-SATURDAY] at East Central University in Ada.
They will be among more than 50 regional, published and emerging authors who will read and discuss their work from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. on April 5 and 6 and from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. on April 7. Each day is broken into several sessions. All sessions are free and open to the public.
For a complete schedule of readers, visit www.ecuscissortail.blogspot.com.
Natasha Trethewey, who received the Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for her collection of poetry, “Native Guard,” will speak at 6:30 p.m. April 5 [THURSDAY] in the Ataloa Theatre in the Hallie Brown Ford Fine Arts Center. The Darryl Fisher High School Creative Writing Contest winners will also be awarded that evening.
Her first collection, “Domestic Work,” won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African-American poet, the 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry.
Her other collections of poetry include “Bellocq’s Ophelia” and “Thrall,” which should be released next fall. Her work has appeared in “The American Poetry Review,” “The Gettysburg Review,” “The Massachusetts Review” and “New England Review.”
Trethewey’s book of creative non-fiction, “Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf,” was released in 2010.
Trethewey was born in Gulfport Miss., and has a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Georgia, a master’s degree in English and creative writing from Hollins University and a master of fine arts degree in poetry from the University of Massachusetts. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bunting Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the National Endowment for the Arts.
She has taught at Auburn University, the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill and Duke University where she was the 2005-06 Lehman Brady joint chair professor of documentary and American studies.
In 2008 Trethewey received the Mississippi Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts for Poetry and was named the Georgia Woman of the Year. She was recently inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame.
Norbert Krapf, Indiana’s poet laureate from 2008 to 2010, will read at 6:30 p.m. April 6 [FRIDAY] in the Estep Multimedia Center in the Bill Cole University Center.
Krapf, whose poem “Back Home” was selected by English artist Martin Donlin to be part of a large stained glass panel for the new Indianapolis, Ind., Airport, was born in Jasper Ind., a German community.
He received a bachelor’s degree in English from St. Joseph’s College and a master’s degree in English and a doctorate in English and American Literature, both from the University of Notre Dame. He taught at the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University from 1970 to 2004 and is now emeritus professor of English.
He twice served in Germany as a senior Fulbright professor of American poetry at the Universities of Freiburg and Erlangen-Nuremberg.
Since 1976 Krapf has written or edited 23 books, two of which are his translations from German. Seventeen of these books are collections of his own poetry including “Bittersweet Along the Expressway: Poems of Long Island” and “Looking for God’s Country.”Three of his works were published in 2008, his prose memoir, “The Ripest Moments: A Southern Indiana Childhood;” “Bloodroot: Indiana Poems,” a selection of 175 of his Indiana poems written from 1971 to 2007; and “Sweet Sister Moon,” which includes love poems and is a tribute to women.
Krapf has received the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, an honorary doctorate of letters from his alma mater, the David Newton Award for Excellence in Teaching from Long Island University and a Trustees Award for Scholarly Achievement LIU.
The Scissortail Creative Writing Festival is sponsored in part by the Oklahoma Arts Council. For more information, contact Dr. Ken Hada at 580-559-5557 or visitwww.ecuscissortail.blogspot.com.