The W’s MFA in creative writing brings a week of public readings

COLUMBUS, Miss. — Students in the low-residency master’s of fine arts program in creative writing at Mississippi University for Women are on campus May 27–June 5 for their first full residency period, consisting of workshops, seminars, mentoring and public readings by students, faculty and guest writers.

Students and faculty will be featured at each of the first three readings with playwright, fiction writer and poet T. K. Lee featured Monday, May 30, novelist Mary Miller (“The Last Days of California”) May 31 and poet Kendall

Dunkelberg (“Barrier Island Suite”) June 1. Readings will include new and published work by faculty and students.

Novelists Deborah Johnson, author of “The Air Between Us” and “The Secret of Magic,” and Allen Wier, author “Blanco,” “Things About to Disappear,” “Departing as Air,” “A Place for Outlaws ” and “Tehano” will be featured Friday, June 3.

Johnson has lived in Columbus for several years and teaches workshops in Stanford University’s continuing education online program in writing. Before moving to the South, Johnson lived in Italy, where she worked for Vatican Radio and as a translator and editor.

A native of Texas, Wier lives in Guntersville, Ala., and has directed the MFA programs at University of Alabama and University of Tennessee. Among his many awards are a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and theRobert Penn Warren Award for Fiction from the Fellowship of Southern Writers.

The public is invited to attend any and all of these evening readings, which will be held in the W Room of Hogarth Student Center, beginning at 7:30 p.m. May 30, May 31, June 1 and June 3.