20th Anniversary Celebration: book launch and poetry reading – free and open to the public!
Twenty years of building community through craft and creativity.
It’s the 20th Anniversary of the Carlow University MFA in Creative Writing Program, and you are invited to help us celebrate all year.
Earlier this year, Carlow University announced a year-long trans-Atlantic (United States & Ireland) celebration of the 20th Anniversary of its MFA in Creative Writing Program. As part of our year-long festivities, we’re planning events and activities, many of which will be open to the public.
20th Anniversary Anthology – all proceeds support scholarships.
As part of the 20th anniversary activities, Carlow’s MFA program has published 20: Carlow University MFA in Creative Writing Program's 20th Anniversary Anthology, a book of poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction representing the very best of Carlow MFA mentors, alums, and students. You can purchase your copy here. All proceeds support the Master of Fine Arts 20th Anniversary Scholarship Campaign.
An event you’ll want to attend.
On May 5th, you can be part of Pittsburgh poet Sheila Carter-Jones’ launch of Every Hard Sweetness. Sheila is an award-winning poet and a proud alum of Carlow’s MFA program. She will be joined on stage by two world-renowned poets, Richard Blanco and Aracelis Girmay. Mark your calendar and be part of this spectacular event.
Sheila L. Carter-Jones is the author of Three Birds Deep, winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Book Award, and her chapbook, Crooked Star Dream Book, was named Honorable Mention for the New York Center for Book Arts Chapbook Contest. She is a fellow of Cave Canem, the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, and a Walter Dakin Fellow of the Sewanee Writer's Conference. She was born and raised in a small coal mining town in Western Pennsylvania, which is the site of many of her poems. Her poetry has been published in various journals, anthologies, and newspapers. Carter-Jones received her MFA from Carlow University, where she currently teaches in their Madwomen in the Attic program. Her recent book, Every Hard Sweetness, is now available from BOA Editions, Ltd.
Selected by President Obama as the fifth Presidential Inaugural Poet in U.S. history, Richard Blanco was the youngest, the first Latinx, immigrant, and gay person to serve in that role. In 2023, Blanco was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Biden from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Born in Madrid to Cuban exile parents and raised in Miami in a working-class family, Blanco's personal negotiation of cultural identity and the universal themes of place and belonging characterize Blanco's many collections of poetry, including his most recent, Homeland of My Body, which reassess traditional notions of home as strictly a geographical, tangible place that merely exist outside us, but rather, within us. He has also authored the memoirs For All of Us, One Today: An Inaugural Poet's Journey and The Prince of Los Cocuyos: A Miami Childhood. Blanco has received numerous awards, including the Agnes Starrett Poetry Prize, the PEN American Beyond Margins Award, the Patterson Prize, and a Lambda Prize for memoir. He was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and has received numerous honorary degrees. Currently, he serves as Education Ambassador for The Academy of American Poets and is an Associate Professor at Florida International University. In Apri 2022, Blanco was appointed the first-ever Poet Laureate or Miami-Dade County.
Aracelis Girmay is the author of three books of poems, most recently the black maria (BOA, 2016) and the chapbook collaboration and was a flower with artist Valentina Améstica. Girmay's essays, interviews, and poems have been published in World Literature Today, Los Angeles Review of Books online, The Poetry Review, and Astra, among other places. She also makes books for young people, including the collaboration with Diana Ejaita entitled Kamau & ZuZu Find A Way (forthcoming with Enchanted Lion). Girmay is on the editorial board of the African Poetry Book Fund and is the current Editor-at-Large for BOA's Blessing the Boats Selections. For the past few years, she collaborated, as editor, on the anthology SO WE CAN KNOW: Writers of Color on Pregnancy, Loss, Abortion, and Birth (Haymarket Books, 2023).
For more information, contact: Tess Barry, tbbarry@carlow.edu
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This email generously sponsored by the Carlow University MFA in Creative Writing Program.