Posted on March 21, 2023
The MFA Writing Program at UNC Greensboro and The UNCG Class of 1952 will host an alumni reading featuring David Blair and Maria Hummel on Friday, April 14th at 7PM in the Curry Building Auditorium, 1109 Spring Garden Street. The reading is a part of the UNCG English Department’s year-long celebration of Fred Chappell. It is free and open to the public and will be followed by a book signing.
DAVID BLAIR grew up in Pittsburgh. He is the author of four books of poetry, Ascension Days, which was chosen by Thomas Lux for the Del Sol Poetry Prize, Arsonville, Friends with Dogs, and Barbarian Seasons. MadHat Press published his first collection of essays Walk Around: Essays about Poetry and Place in 2019. His poems have appeared in Boston Review, The Greensboro Review, Ploughshares, Slate Magazine, storySouth, and many other places as well, including the anthologies, Welcome to the Neighborhood: An Anthology of American Coexistence, The Best of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Devouring the Green, and Zoland Poetry. He has taught at the New England Institute of Art, Bentley University, Framingham State University, the online graduate program in creative writing at Southern New Hampshire University, and in the M.FA. Writing Program at the University of New Hampshire. He lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, with his wife and daughter, and he has a degree in philosophy from Fordham University and an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
MARIA HUMMEL is a poet and novelist. Her books include Lesson in Red, Still Lives, a Reese Witherspoon x Hello Sunshine pick, a Book of the Month Club pick, and BBC Culture Best Book of 2018; Motherland, a San Francisco Chronicle Book of the Year; and House and Fire, winner of the APR/Honickman Poetry Prize. The winner of a Stegner Fellowship, Bread Loaf Fellowship, and Pushcart Prize, Hummel has been praised for fiction that is “savvy and lyrical” (Wall Street Journal) and “deeply affecting” (Los Angeles Times), and poetry that is “stunning… simple and deep, brimming with love and pain” (The Rumpus). Her other awards include a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, the Penelope Niven Creative Nonfiction Award, and fellowships to Squaw Valley Writers’ Conference and Vermont Studio Center. Hummel worked for many years as an arts editor and journalist, and as a writer/editor for The Museum of Contemporary Art, experience that informed Still Lives and Lesson in Red. She also taught creative writing at Stanford University for close to a decade and is now an associate professor at the University of Vermont. She lives in Vermont with her husband and sons.
For directions and parking information, visit Spartan Directions: https://idcapps.uncg.edu/access/access.html?id=Curry
