Comics (etc.) at Krannert Art Museum

Last week, the exhibition Out of Sequence: Underrepresented Voices in American Comics opened at Krannert Art Museum to a crowd of nearly 500 folks. The exhibition seeks to showcase American sequential art that steps outside the traditional bounds of the medium by focusing on historical and contemporary women and minority comic creators as well as work created with nontraditional techniques.

Events of interest related to the exhibition include a gallery conversation with co-curators Damian Duffy and John Jennings (Thursday, October 30, 5:30 pm),

and a talk entitled, "Emerging Out of Sequence: Examining the Past and Charting the Future of American Comics" with exhibitors Nancy Goldstein, Andrei Molotiu, Trina Robbins, and Ashley A. Woods (Saturday, November 8, 1-4 pm).

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Other upcoming events at the museum for October/November:

Thursday, October 30
IPRH Film Series
Ed Wood (1994), directed by Tim Burton
KAM Auditorium, 5:30 pm

Friday, November 7
VOICE Reading Series
MFA Creative Writing reading series, featuring guest readers Mike Alber, Gina Ventre, and Claire Watkins from Ohio State. UIUC poets Matt Minicucci and Dana Burchfield will also be reading.
KAM 20th century gallery, 3:30 pm

Thursday, November 13
IPRH Film Series
Singin' in the Rain (1952), directed by Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly
KAM Auditorium, 5:30 pm

SPEAK Cafe
Open-mic for hip-hop and Black power expression
Palette Cafe, 7-9 pm

Friday, November 14
A Call to Arts
Open art critiques with Jerry Savage and Peter Bodnar
Jerry Savage's studio (2137 County Road, 1100 North, Sidney, IL), 7:00 pm

As always, events are free and open to the public, and held @ Krannert Art Museum, 500 E. Peabody Drive, Champaign, IL unless otherwise noted.

Find out more by visiting KAM's website, signing up for e-news (email kam@illinois.edu), or by joining the museum's facebook group.

Whiting Awards announced

Congratulations to 9L contributor Douglas Kearney, who was named one of the recipients of the 2008 Whiting Writers' Awards. The awards are bestowed annually on writers "of exceptional talent and promise in early career" and come with a cash prize of $50,000. A selection of Doug Kearney's poems appeared in our Fall/Winter 2007-8 issue.

Philip Graham's latest dispatch at McSweeney's

Check out "Three Churches" at mcsweeneys.net, wherein Philip Graham describes some of the weird and wonderful things he saw while exploring some of Portugal's churches.

Keith Lee Morris

9L contributor, Keith Lee Morris will be a featured reader on Wednesday, October 22, at The Happy Ending Music and Reading Series in NYC. The show starts at 8pm and is free and open to the public.

In other Keith Lee Morris news, his new novel,The Dart League King, is now available from Tin House Books.

Literary Translation: A View from the Pacific

The University of Illinois's new Center for Translation Studies is hosting their first Translation Colloquium on Monday October 27th, at 4:00 in the Lucy Ellis Lounge of the Foreign Languages Building, 707 S. Mathews, Urbana.

Jean Anderson, Director of the New Zealand Center for Literary Translation, and Senior Lecturer in the Department of French at Victoria University of Wellington, will be giving a lecture entitled “Literary Translation: A View from the Pacific.” She herself is a translator of francophone texts of the Pacific (Tahiti, New Caledonia) and works to get New Zealand writers translated into French.

New Review at NewPages

The literary review site newpages.com has a very nice review of our Spring/Summer 2008 issue. Singled out for praise are prose writers Ron Carlson, Steve Tomasula, Tom Whalen, and Dave King, and poets Francine J. Harris and Twilight Greenaway.

Bonus: The review of the spring issue of Monkey Bicycle, which appears immediately before our review, makes special mention of 9L friend and UI grad student Aaron Burch, so check that out as well!

Iron Horse Novella Competition

Iron Horse Literary Review is hosting a novella competition, judged by Ron Carlson. Carlson is the author of Five Skies, At the Jim Bridger, Plan B for the Middle Class, and numerous other novels and short story collections. He currently teaches in the creative writing program at University of California, Irvine.

The winning novella will be published in 2009 as a separate issue. Full-color cover art will reflect the novella’s content and emphasize the novella’s title, not the name of Iron Horse. The published novella will look like the single-author book that it is. The winner also receives a $1,000 honorarium.

Formatting Instructions:

Entries must be between 15,000 and 21,000 words.

Manuscripts must be typed, double-spaced, with one-inch margins.

Manuscripts must be previously unpublished.

The author’s name and contact information must appear on a cover sheet, but it must NOT appear anywhere else on the manuscript.

Pages must be numbered.

Entries must include the $15 reading fee, which also purchases a subscription to Iron Horse.

Entries must also include an email address for results notification.

Mail entries to Iron Horse Literary Review, Texas Tech University, English Department, Mail Stop 43091, Lubbock, TX 79409-3091.

Postmark deadline for entries is November 15, 2008.

Entries failing to meet formatting instructions will be automatically disqualified.

Additional questions should be directed to the editors at ironhorselitrev@yahoo.com.