UIUC Visiting Writers Reading: University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

As part of the annual Boneyard Arts Festival, the University of Illinois will hold its first Visiting Writers Reading, featuring students from the PhD in Creative Writing program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and special guest Frank Montesonti, as well as students from UIUC’s MFA in Creative Writing program.

Please join us on April 13^th at 5:30PM for this special event, to be held at Mike 'n Molly's in downtown Champaign. Learn more about our readers here:

Ching-in Chen is the author of The Heart's Traffic (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press) and co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities (South End Press). A Kundiman and Lambda Fellow, Ching-In is part of the Macondo and Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation writing communities, and has been a participant in Sharon Bridgforth's Theatrical Jazz Institute. Ching-In attends the PhD program in Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee and is Cream City Review's editor-in-chief.

Loretta McCormick is a native Angelino and creative writing PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she studies and writes about freakery, disability and death. She is a fiction editor for Cream City Review, and her work has appeared in The Northridge Review. 

 

Khaleel Gheba is an MFA candidate in Poetry, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He grew up in Maryland. He once used a poem to lift a burning car off of a baby. He's very tired. Please don't wake him.

Natalie Mesnard is a student in the Creative Writing program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her work is forthcoming in Copper Nickel and Kenyon Review Online.

Greg Rodgers is an author and Choctaw storyteller who appears at schools, libraries, universities, museums, and tribal events throughout the country. He has written two books, The Ghost of Mingo Creek and One Dark Night in Oklahoma. Additionally, he is a contributing writer for the graphic-anthology, Trickster, an ALA Children's Notable Book for 2011. Greg is listed as an official Smithsonian Associate and is currently a Graduate Assistant in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Kara Van de Graaf is a doctoral student in creative writing at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and a miniature silverware enthusiast. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the anthology Best New Poets, Ninth Letter, Indiana Review, Mid-American Review, Third Coast, Alaska Quarterly Review and other journals. She is a poetry editor for Cream City Review.  Her favorite animal is the goat.

Special guest Frank Montesonti is the author of two full-length collections of poetry, Blight, Blight, Blight, Ray of Hope, winner of the 2011 Barrow Street Book Prize chosen by D.A. Powell, and the book of erasure, Hope Tree (How To Prune Fruit Trees) by Black Lawrence Press. He is also author of the chapbook, A Civic Pageant, also from Black Lawrence Press. His poems have appeared in journals such as Tin House, AQR, Black Warrior Review, Poet Lore, and Poems and Plays, among many others. A longtime resident of Indiana, he now lives in Los Angeles and teaches creative writing at National University.