CoMoLit

Poet : Kevin PruferKevin Prufer’s newest books are National Anthem (Four Way, 2008) and Fallen from a Chariot (Carnegie Mellon, 2005). With Wayne Miller, he’s also editor the New European Poets (Graywolf, 2008) and Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing.  The recipient of three Pushcart prizes, he lives in Warrensburg, MO.

Prose:  Dave CollinsDave Collins has taught literature and creative writing at Westminster College for the past thirty-four years. He has published work in the New Laurel Review, Hawaii Review, Chariton Review, and Pleiades and most recently an article on traveling in Senegal in the St. Louis Magazine and an interview with Jake Lamar, an African-American writer living in Paris, in Belles Lettres.

Come and join us at the Cherry Street Artisan on Thursday, April 24th, for the fourth Center reading, this time at 7:30.  This one will feature at least two MU grad students, John Estes and Sarah Barber, both members of MU’s poetry program, and much more.  We’re very excited to again offer two featured readers, Aliki Barnstone from the MU faculty, and Kevin Prufer, from University of Central Missouri.

The Center Reading Group will meet at the Artisan on Saturday, 4/19, at 2pm, to discuss Kevin’s great new book, National Anthem.  For more information, e-mail Chad Parmenter at the address on Mizzou’s directory, and have a great spring.

You won’t want to miss this evening’s fabulous readings! Bring a friend or two out of the cold and into the warm atmosphere of Orr St. on Tuesday at 7 pm. Mizzou’s own Aliki Barnstone will read poetry and J. Mark Bertrand, in from Soiux Falls, will read a short story. 

Come to the Cherry Street Artisan at 8pm, on February 14th, and you’ll have an evening that’s romantic, gritty, and everything in between. Jason Bredle and Simone Muench are both wonderful poets who are kindly taking the time to drive all the way down from Chicago and share their work with us. Jason’s first book, Standing In Line for the Beast, may be the most hilarious collection to come out last year, and Simone’s most recent book, Lampblack & Ash, offers language of such a fierce lyricism that it seems to issue from the body’s deepest centers of gravity and heat.

The Mizzou graduate student readers featured will be Marc McKee, Katy Didden, and Liz Fletcher, all of whom rock. So do you. So you should come down, for them and for the special presentation by a member of Stop Traffic, the awesome MU group dedicated to shutting down human trafficking, in our corner of the world and beyond. What better way to spend an evening of love?

Our spring semester kicks off Tuesday, January 22 at Orr with the film: Picasso: Magic, Sex, Death. 
John Richardson, friend and biographer of Picasso, narrates this film about the essence of Picasso.  An intimate look into the life of the artist, it contains footage of Picasso, his friends and family as well as a wide variety of the artwork itself. Part I (75minutes.) Come join us!