11th annual Montevallo Literary Festival
Friday, April 12, 2013

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11th annual Montevallo Literary Festival lineup

Robin Behn, Master-Class Instructor in Poetry

Robin Behn is the author of six volumes of poems, most recently The Yellow House, Naked Writing, and Horizon Note, and the co-editor of The Practice of Poetry: Writing Exercises from Poets Who Teach.  A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Alabama State Council on the Arts, she teaches in the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at The University of Alabama where she also directs the Creative Writing Club for high school writers. Her poems have appeared widely in journals and in Best American Poetry, Pushcart Prize Anthology, Plume Poetry Anthology, Best of the Web, and Poetry Daily. She is the flute and whistle player in Waxwing Band, with whom she performs her "fiddle tune poems." 

Jennifer S. Davis, Master-Class Instructor in Prose

Jennifer S. Davis's first collection of stories, Her Kind of Want (2002) was the winner of The Iowa Short Fiction Award, and her second collection of stories, Our Former Lives in Art, was published by Random House in 2007. Davis was born and raised in Alabama, where she grew up exploring the banks of Lake Martin and the Tallapoosa River. She has lived and worked in Montana, Denver, Miami, Rio de Janeiro, Washington state and New Orleans. A graduate of the University of Alabama’s MFA program, she currently teaches at Louisiana State University.

Chantel Acevedo

Chantel Acevedo’s first novel, Love and Ghost Letters won the Latino International Book Award and was a finalist for the Connecticut Book of the Year.  Song of the Red Cloak, a historical novel for young adults, was published in 2011. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Prairie Schooner, American Poetry Review, North American Review, and Chattahoochee Review, among others.  Acevedo was named a Literature Fellow by the Alabama State Council on the Arts in 2012.  She is currently an Associate Professor of English and Alumni Writer-in-Residence at Auburn University, where she founded the Auburn Writers Conference and edits the Southern Humanities Review.

James Braziel

James Braziel is the author of the Bantam novels Birmingham, 35 Miles and Snakeskin Road.  Weathervane, a chapbook of his poetry was published by Finishing Line Press.   His fiction and poetry have appeared in Berkeley Fiction Review, Chattahoochee Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Clackamas Literary Review, among other journals.  He has also been the recipient of an Individual Artist Grant from the Georgia Council for the Arts and twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize.  Currently, he teaches creative writing at the University of Alabama, Birmingham.

Peter Streckfus

Peter Streckfus's first book, The Cuckoo, was the 2004 winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition.  His recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day, Pleiades, The Seattle Review, Slate, West Branch, and The New Republic. He is the recipient of awards from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the Peter S. Reed Foundation, and the University of Alabama, where he is on the faculty of the Program in Creative Writing.

Adam Vines

Adam Vines (MFA, University of Florida) is an assistant professor of English at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He has published work in Poetry, Barrow Street, 32 Poems, North American Review, Cincinnati Review, New Orleans Review, Redivider, The Literary Review, and others. His collection of poetry, The Coal Life, was a finalist for the Miller Williams Prize and was published by the University of Arkansas Press in 2012. For his short fiction and poetry, he has received five Hackney Awards. He was a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and during the summers, he is on staff at SWC. He has won awards for his teaching from the University of Florida and UAB. The Alabama State Council on the Arts awarded him a 2013 Individual Artist Fellowship. He is editor of Birmingham Poetry Review and faculty advisor for the UAB Fishing Team.

Proposed Schedule