Explore Greece in Poetry this Monday

This Monday, October 29th at 5pm, Donna Gelagotis Lee will read from her award winning poetry collection, On the Altar of Greece, at Illini Union Bookstore, 2nd floor Author's Corner. Gelagotis is a long time resident of Greece and the winner of the Gival Press Poetry Award,
Recipient of a 2007 Eric Hoffer Book Award: Notable for Art Category, and nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry.

The collection is a free verse exploration of one American woman's experience in the past and present of Greece.

Booksigning will follow the reading.

Utne Independent Press Award Noms

The Utne Reader has announced this year's nominees for the Utne Independent Press Awards, and 9L is proud to say we've been nominated in the category for Best Design. We're in stellar company, too--fellow nominees in design & other categories include Maisonneuve, VQR, The Believer, The Sun, Bookforum, and the Village Voice.

Thompson on the Short Story

A few days ago, author (UIUC alum, UIUC professor emeritus, and all-around awesome lady) Jean Thompson respond to Stephen King's "What Ails the Short Story?" with her own sharp, funny, dead-on assessment here in Maud Newton's blog.

We should have posted this sooner. We have been overwhelmed by page proofs. The new issue is coming in just a few weeks!

The Poetry Center of Chicago Presents…

a reading with A. Van Jordan and Tyehimba Jess, this Wednesday, October 17, 2007 at 6:30 pm, SAIC Ballroom, 112 S. Michigan Avenue,Chicago, IL .

A. Van Jordan's first book, Rise, won the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award and was a selection of the Academy of American Poets book club. He is an assistant professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Tyehimba Jess' first book, leadbelly, was a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series. Jess received a 2006 Whiting Award, a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2004, and was a 2004-5 Winter Fellow at Provincetown 's Fine Arts Work Center. He won an Illinois Arts Council Artist Fellowship in Poetry for 2000 - 2001, and the 2001 Chicago Sun-Times Poetry Award

The event is $10 for public, $8 for students, and free for members and SAIC students, faculty and staff.

Start Your Week with Power

Susan Power, author of award-winning novels Grass Dancer and Roofwalker ,will read Monday, October 15 at 4:30pm at Illini Union Bookstore (upstairs in the Author's Corner).

Recipient of numerous literary awards and honors, Susan is also an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and a native of Chicago. Her writing was praised by Amy Tan as "pure magic", and that only begins to describe the experience of her lyrical fiction. Don't miss the chance to hear this amazing writer.

The Nobel Goes To...

the marvelous Doris Lessing, who was named this morning as the winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature. Lessing, who was born in Persia and raised in Rhodesia, now lives in London, and is described by the Swedish Academy as "that epicist of the female experience who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny."

The 87-year-old Lessing is only the 11th woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize in Literature since the award's inception in 1901. She is the author of nearly 50 books of fiction and nonfiction.

Get Your Bets In Now

We're not running a Nobel pool, but maybe somebody is...tomorrow the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature will be announced, and 9L's own Andrew Ervin has come up with handicaps for this year's top contenders:

Transtrommer (Sweden) 2:1
Achebe (Nigeria) 4:1
Adonis (Syria) 8:1
Magris (Italy) 8:1
Roth (United States) 12:1
Munro (Canada) 20:1
Murray (Australia) 50:1
Houellebecq (France) 100:1

Poetry for your enjoyment

Go over to The Scrambler to read a poem by 9L's own Adam Deutsch appearing in their fall issue. How cool is that?

Looking for a New Place to Send Your Work?

Look no further, send to The Normal School - a literary magazine now accepting: Creative Nonfiction. Story. Poem. Critique. Experiential Recipes.Quirky. Boundary-challenging. Energetic. Innovative in both form and focus. The Normal School is the equivalent of the kid who always has bottle caps, cat's eye marbles, dead animal skulls and other treasures in his pockets. Contributing Editors include Steve Almond, Tom Bissell, Beth Ann Fennelly, Jacqueline Lyons, Duncan Murrell, Laura Pritchett, Steve Yarbrough, and MORE.

Are you The Normal School material? Send your work to: The Normal School 5245 N. Backer Ave. M/S PB 98California State University, FresnoFresno, CA 93740-8001OR as an attachment in .doc or .rtf format only to submissions@thenormalschool.com
http://www.thenormalschool.com/

Please include an email address in your contact information and indicate genre to the best of your ability.