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 Mary Biddinger |
Poetry is on the menu as Mary Biddinger and Jeannine Hall Gailey appear as visiting writers in the Department of English at SUNY Fredonia.
On Tuesday, Oct. 2, the pair will give a craft talk at 3:30 p.m. in Fenton Hall Room 127. At 7 p.m., they will give a reading in McEwen Hall Room 202, to be followed by a question-and-answer session and book-signing. Featured books are available at the bookstore in University Commons on campus. All events are free and the public is invited to attend.
Ms. Biddinger received degrees in English and creative writing from The University of Michigan, Bowling Green State University, and The University of Illinois at Chicago. She is currently an assistant professor of English at the University of Akron and NEOMFA: Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program, where she teaches workshops and craft and theory courses on a variety of topics, including poetry of the body.
Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous journals including ACM, American Literary Review, Crazyhorse, Harpur Palate, The Iowa Review, Notre Dame Review, Ploughshares, and Salt Hill, and her first book, “Prairie Fever,” is now available from Steel Toe Books. For several years she has been an associate editor of the literary magazine RHINO, and she is the founding editor of “Barn Owl Review,” a new literary annual published in Northeast Ohio. Author Nin Andrews noted of poet’s first book, “Biddinger’s distinctive voice is both mystically beautiful and disarmingly sensual. The grit and suffering of rural America are so beautifully rendered, the profane becomes sacred, the ordinary extraordinary.”
Ms. Gailey has a master's degree in English from the University of Cincinnati, and is currently studying for her Master of Fine Arts in Poetry at Pacific University. She volunteers as a literary magazine and book reviewer at NewPages.com and also as web editor (and currently, guest poetry editor) at The Raven Chronicles.
Her book of poems, “Becoming the Villainess” was a finalist for Kent State's Wick Prize, the Winnow Press First Book contest, and the Carnegie Mellon University Press Poetry Series, and was a semifinalist for the Bakeless Poetry Prize in 2004. Ilya Kaminsky noted, “In this splendidly entertaining debut, Jeannine Hall Gailey offers us a world both familiar and magical—filled with fairytale and mythology characters that are our own bedfellows—we wake up with Philomel and argue with Ophelia while half-listening to a Snow Queen, amidst Spy Girls, Amazons and Mongolian Cows. The wild and seductive energy in this collection never lets one put the book down.”
Ms. Gailey also has a chapbook, “Female Comic Book Superheroes,” published by Pudding House Press.
