This will be a 2 day mini-conference to bring 6 past Creative Writing MFA students back to Notre Dame to read their newest works. Readers will include Angela Hur, Katie Lehman, Christina Kubasta, Stuart Ross, Michael Smith, and Charles Valle.
Angela Hur has a BA from Harvard and an MFA from Notre Dame, where she was a Sparks Fellow and Sparks Prize winner. Her debut novel The Queens of K-town was published in 2007 by MacAdam/Cage and has been assigned in Korean Diaspora Lit classes at Stanford, UC Berkeley, University of British Columbia, and the University of Seoul. Angela has taught creative writing at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul, Korea and for Writopia, a national non-profit. She's also worked as a staff editor at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Her novel Folklorn was chosen by MacArthur Fellow Kelly Link for a Tin House Mentorship. Excerpts of Folklorn have been published in Harvard's Azalea: Journal of Korean Literature and Stockholm University's Two Thirds North.
C. Kubasta writes poetry, prose & hybrid forms. Her favorite rejection (so far) noted that one editor loved her work, and the other hated it. She is the author of the full-length collections, All Beautiful & Useless (BlazeVOX), Of Covenants (Whitepoint Press), and the novella Girling (Brain Mill Press). Her novel This Business of the Flesh is newly out from Apprentice House. She teaches literature, writing & cultural studies at Marian University, where she is active with the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets, and works with Brain Mill Press. Find her at ckubasta.com. Follow her @CKubastathePoet.
Katie Lehman is an editor and poet based in Bloomington, Indiana. She received an MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from the University of Notre Dame in 1999, studying under Sonia Gernes and John Matthias, and won the Billy Maich Academy of American Poets Prize from Notre Dame in 1998. From 2004 to 2010 she served as an assistant editor at the University of Notre Dame Press. Lehman has edited many magazines, manuscripts, and scholarly works on a wide range of topics. Most recently, she is the volume editor of a new book by John Matthias and John Peck titled Regrounding a Pilgrimage, published by Dos Madres Press in 2018, in which she situates Matthias’s long poem about the pilgrimage routes to Santiago de Compostela, “A Compostela Diptych,” alongside Peck’s meditation on the subject, “Agensay, Agengrownde, Matthias.” Her poems have appeared in Center for Mennonite Writing Journal, GilChrist Letter, and Great River Review.
Stuart Ross is a writer living in Chicago. His novel Jenny in Corona is available from Tortoise Books. Visit: stuartmross.com
Mike Smith teaches at Delta State University and lives with his family of seven deep in the Mississippi Delta. He is the author of seven books, including, most recently, POCKET GUIDE TO ANOTHER EARTH and the memoir, AND THERE WAS EVENING AND THERE WAS MORNING, which documents the strange parallels between the illness and death of his first wife, also a Notre Dame grad, and the illness and recovery of his stepdaughter three years later.
Charles Valle is a Poetry Editor for FENCE Magazine disguised as a Change Management Consultant—negotiating the liminal space between Business and Poetics. His work can be found in various literary journals.