University of Montevallo - English Department

Save the date!

Montevallo Literary Festival: Friday, April 13, 2012

Please mark your calendars for the 10th annual Montevallo Literary Festival, a celebration of creative writing hosted by the University of Montevallo. The 2012 festival will be held Friday, April 13, on the UM campus. This friendly, relaxed festival is dedicated to bringing literary writers and readers together on a personal scale. This year’s offerings will include readings by all invited writers, book signings, receptions, and master-class workshops in poetry and prose, capped by a dinner with live music. This year’s lineup of creative writers includes workshop leaders Joy Castro (prose) and James Kimbrell (poetry), as well as Erica Dawson, Michael F. Smith, and Ralph Voss. Updates, schedules, and registration information will be available soon on this website. Check in also at our Facebook page:

www.facebook.com/MontevalloLiteraryFestival

Montevallo Literary Festival Lineup: April 13, 2012

Joy Castro, Master-Class Instructor in Prose
Castro’s first book, The Truth Book: A Memoir (2005), was named a Book Sense Notable Book by the American Booksellers Association and was adapted and excerpted in The New York Times Magazine. Her short fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction have appeared in several anthologies and in journals such as North American Review, Cream City Review, Chelsea, Quarterly West, and Puerto del Sol. Named one of 2009’s Best New Latino Authors by LatinoStories.com, Castro has two books forthcoming in 2012: Hell or High Water, a crime thriller set in New Orleans, and Island of Bones, a collection of creative nonfiction and personal essays. An award-winning teacher, she has published articles on innovative strategies for the college classroom, and her published literary scholarship focuses on issues of class, gender, and race in the work of experimental women writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Castro also is finishing a collection of short stories, How Winter Began, and working on a second novel. She is an associate professor of English and Ethnic Studies at University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Erica Dawson
Erica Dawson’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Blackbird, Birmingham Poetry Review, Best American Poetry 2008, Southwest Review, Harvard Review, Barrow Street, Literary Imagination, and other journals and anthologies. Her collection of poems, Big-Eyed Afraid (2007), won the Anthony Hecht Prize and was named Best Debut of 2007 by Contemporary Poetry Review. She is an assistant professor of English and Writing at University of Tampa, where, in addition to teaching undergraduates, she serves as poetry editor for Tampa Review and will teach in the university’s new low-residency MFA program.

James Kimbrell, Master-Class Instructor in Poetry
Kimbrell is the author of two poetry collections, My Psychic (2006) and The Gatehouse Heaven (1998). He has received a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship in poetry, the Whiting Writer's Award, the Ruth Lilly Fellowship, the "Discovery"/The Nation Award, a Ford Foundation Fellowship, and has twice received the Academy of American Poets Prize. Recent poems, reviews, and translations have appeared in magazines and anthologies such as Poetry, Field, Fence, The Nation, Prairie Schooner, The Boston Book Review, American Poetry: The Next Generation and The Bread Loaf Anthology of New American Poets. Recently, he served as the Renee and John Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi. He lives in Tallahassee, where he teaches in the creative writing program at Florida State University.

Michael F. Smith
Smith is a native Mississippian who has lived throughout the Southeast and spent considerable time living abroad in France and Switzerland. He has been awarded the Mississippi Arts Commission Literary Arts Fellowship, the Transatlantic Review Award for Fiction, the Alabama Arts Council Fellowship Award for Literature, and the Brick Streets Press Short Story Award. His short fiction has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and his fiction and non-fiction have appeared in numerous literary reviews and anthologies. He has been invited to read at multiple venues, from Boston to Manhattan to Montrichard, France. His first novel, The Hands of Strangers, is now available from Main Street Rag Publishing in Charlotte, North Carolina. He teaches creative writing at Mississippi University for Women.

Ralph F. Voss
Voss is emeritus professor in English at the University of Alabama; during his lengthy teaching career, he specialized in writing, rhetoric, and dramatic literature. His newest nonfiction book is Truman Capote and the Legacy of In Cold Blood (Fall 2011). A writer and editor of numerous college-writing textbooks and articles, Voss also is the author of The Strains of Triumph: A Life of William Inge (1989). In addition, he edited and wrote the introduction to Magical Muse: Millennial Essays on Tennessee Williams (2002) and co-edited Against the Grain: A Volume in Honor of Maxine Hairston (2002).

This project has been made possible by grants from the Alabama State Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Alabama Humanities Foundation, a state program of the National Endowment for the Humanities, with additional support from the Friends of MLF and the University of Montevallo. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this web site do not necessarily represent our sponsors.

2011 Montevallo Literary Festival

2010 Montevallo Literary Festival

2009 Montevallo Literary Festival

2008 Montevallo Literary Festival

2007 Montevallo Literary Festival

Photos from 2006 Festival
Photos from 2005 Festival

	Joy Castro, Master-Class Instructor in Prose Castro’s first book, The Truth Book: A Memoir (2005), was named a Book Sense Notable Book by the American Booksellers Association and was adapted and excerpted in The New York Times Magazine. Her short fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction have appeared in several anthologies and in journals such as North American Review, Cream City Review, Chelsea, Quarterly West, and Puerto del Sol. Named one of 2009’s Best New Latino Authors by LatinoStories.com, Castro has two books forthcoming in 2012: Hell or High Water, a crime thriller set in New Orleans, and Island of Bones, a collection of creative nonfiction and personal essays. An award-winning teacher, she has published articles on innovative strategies for the college classroom, and her published literary scholarship focuses on issues of class, gender, and race in the work of experimental women writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Castro also is finishing a collection of short stories, How Winter Began, and working on a second novel. She is an associate professor of English and Ethnic Studies at University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
	Erica Dawson Erica Dawson’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Blackbird, Birmingham Poetry Review, Best American Poetry 2008, Southwest Review, Harvard Review, Barrow Street, Literary Imagination, and other journals and anthologies. Her collection of poems, Big-Eyed Afraid (2007), won the Anthony Hecht Prize and was named Best Debut of 2007 by Contemporary Poetry Review. She is an assistant professor of English and Writing at University of Tampa, where, in addition to teaching undergraduates, she serves as poetry editor for Tampa Review and will teach in the university’s new low-residency MFA program.
	James Kimbrell, Master-Class Instructor in Poetry Kimbrell is the author of two poetry collections, My Psychic (2006) and The Gatehouse Heaven (1998). He has received a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship in poetry, the Whiting Writer's Award, the Ruth Lilly Fellowship, the "Discovery"/The Nation Award, a Ford Foundation Fellowship, and has twice received the Academy of American Poets Prize. Recent poems, reviews, and translations have appeared in magazines and anthologies such as Poetry, Field, Fence, The Nation, Prairie Schooner, The Boston Book Review, American Poetry: The Next Generation and The Bread Loaf Anthology of New American Poets. Recently, he served as the Renee and John Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi. He lives in Tallahassee, where he teaches in the creative writing program at Florida State University.
	Michael F. Smith Smith is a native Mississippian who has lived throughout the Southeast and spent considerable time living abroad in France and Switzerland. He has been awarded the Mississippi Arts Commission Literary Arts Fellowship, the Transatlantic Review Award for Fiction, the Alabama Arts Council Fellowship Award for Literature, and the Brick Streets Press Short Story Award. His short fiction has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and his fiction and non-fiction have appeared in numerous literary reviews and anthologies. He has been invited to read at multiple venues, from Boston to Manhattan to Montrichard, France. His first novel, The Hands of Strangers, is now available from Main Street Rag Publishing in Charlotte, North Carolina. He teaches creative writing at Mississippi University for Women.
	Ralph F. Voss Voss is emeritus professor in English at the University of Alabama; during his lengthy teaching career, he specialized in writing, rhetoric, and dramatic literature. His newest nonfiction book is Truman Capote and the Legacy of In Cold Blood (Fall 2011). A writer and editor of numerous college-writing textbooks and articles, Voss also is the author of The Strains of Triumph: A Life of William Inge (1989). In addition, he edited and wrote the introduction to Magical Muse: Millennial Essays on Tennessee Williams (2002) and co-edited Against the Grain: A Volume in Honor of Maxine Hairston (2002).