UM Race and Creative Writing Conference:
Friday, March 13th: Allies and Race: A reading with Jess Row, David Greenberg, Ailish Hopper, and Joy Katz, moderated by Rachell Mindell. 11 am - 12:50 pm.
Jess Row is the author of the novel Your Face in Mine (2014) and two collections of short stories, Nobody Ever Gets Lost (2011) and The Train to Lo Wu (2005). His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Granta, Tin House, and many other venues, and he's a frequent contributor to The New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, and Boston Review. He is currently working on a collection of essays about race and American fiction, White Flights, to be published by Graywolf.
Joy Katz's third collection of poems, All You Do is Perceive (Four Way Books), was named one of the best books of 2013 by the Kansas City Star. Her honors include a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Wallace Stegner fellowship, a Pushcart prize, and a 2014 Professional Artist grant from the Pittsburgh Foundation for her work-in-progress, Frayed, about race and voice. She teaches in the MFA program at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, Pa.
Ailish Hopper is the author of Dark~Sky Society (New Issues, 2014), and the chapbook, Bird in the Head (Center for Book Arts, 2005). Poems are around in APR, American Letters & Commentary, Harvard Review Online, Ploughshares, Poetry, and other places. An essay about race and the alienation effect in poetry, "The Gentle Art of Making Enemies," is in Laura McCullough's anthology, A Sense of Regard: Essays on Poetry and Race. Another, "Can a Poem Listen?" about white racism in poetryLand, is forthcoming in Boston Review. She has received support from the MacDowell Colony, Vermont Studio, and Yaddo, and teach at Goucher College. She also teaches in the MFA in Visual Arts program at UMBC.
The author of Planned Solstice (Iowa), David Micah Greenberg’s poems have appeared in The New Republic, Ploughshares, Colorado Review, and other publications, and have received awards from NEH and the American Academy of Poets. A former organizer with homeless men and women and the advocacy and policy director of a coalition of 90 neighborhood housing organizations in New York City, he now designs and evaluates community initiatives for a national nonprofit. Published essays on poetry and the public sphere have appeared in Poets and Writers and provoked a forum in The Boston Review.