Posted on August 12, 2022
The Rodney Jones and Maria Hummel alumni poetry and fiction reading has been cancelled due to inclement weather. Tomorrow’s Celebration of Fred Chappell will occur as scheduled.
The MFA Writing Program at UNC Greensboro and The Class of 1952 will host an alumni poetry & fiction reading by Rodney Jones and Maria Hummel on Friday, September 30 at 7:00 PM in in UNCG Alumni House. 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 and reception. For directions and campus parking options visit: https://idcapps.uncg.edu/access/access.html?id=Alumni%20House
Rodney Jones is the author Village Prodigies; Salvation Blues: One Hundred Poems, 1985–2005 , winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize; Elegy for the Southern Drawl , a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Transparent Gestures, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award; and The Story They Told Us of Light. His numerous honors include the Harper Lee Award for Alabama’s Distinguished Writer of the Year, the Jean Stein Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Excellence, and the Peter I. B. Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets. He has also received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the Guggenheim Foundation. For years Jones served as a professor in the creative writing program at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale; he also taught at the University of Cincinnati and DePauw University. He now teaches in the low-residency MFA program for writers at Warren Wilson College. He lives in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Maria Hummel is a novelist and poet. Her books include Lesson in Red, a follow-up to 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.
