Come celebrate National Poetry Month during first annual Kentucky Poetry Month, sponsored by the University of Kentucky's MFA in Creative Writing!

2015 Kentucky Poetry Festival Events

April 24 - May 01

• Off the Ground Featuring Bianca Lynne Spriggs

  • Common Grounds on High Street

  • Friday April 24, 2015

  • 7:30pm

  • Affrilachian Poet and Cave Canem Fellow, Bianca Lynne Spriggs is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in Lexington, Kentucky. She is the author of Kaffir Lily (Wind Publications, 2010), How Swallowtails Become Dragons (Accents Publishing, 2011), and the forthcoming titles, Call Her By Her Name (Northwestern University Press, 2016), The Galaxy is a Dance Floor (Argos Books, 2016), and Circe's Lament: An Anthology of Wild Women (Accents Publishing, 2015). Her work may be found in numerous journals and anthologies. Open mic to follow!
     

• KFP College Showcase

  • James F. Hardymon Theater, inside the Davis Marksbury Building on the UK's campus, 329 Rose Street

  • Saturday April 25, 2015

  • 2:00pm

  • Creative writing college students from around Kentucky will read their poetry.

• A Reading by Louisvillian Poets, feat. Jeremy Clark, Adam Day, Lynnell Edwards, Michael Estes, and Martha Greenwald

  • James F. Hardymon Theater, inside the Davis Marksbury Building on the UK's campus, 329 Rose Street

  • Saturday April 25, 2015

  • 7:00pm

  • Louisville Poets will read their work.

• Verse in Type

  • Clark Art & Antique, 801 Winchester Rd, Lexington, KY 40505

  • Sunday April 26th

  • 3:00pm

  • Broadside display from the King Library Press.

• UK Libraries King Library Spring Seminar

  • Boone Center

  • Tuesday April 28th

  • 7:00pm

  • Dara Wier and Emily Pettit will lecture for the King Library as Keynote Speakers. King Library Press Broadside Contest Award winner will read.
     

• Waxing Gastronomic: Food Poetry Open Mic

  • Donut Days on Southland

  • Wednesday April 29

  • 4:00pm

• Dara Wier & Emily Pettit, Visiting Writers Series

  • UK Art Museum

  • Wednesday April 29th

  • 7:00pm

  • Dara Wier is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including You Good Thing (Wave Books, 2013); Selected Poems (2009); Remnants of Hannah (2006); Reverse Rapture (2005), and many others. She teaches workshops and form and theory seminars and directs the M.F.A. program for poets and writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

  • Emily Pettit is the author of Goat in the Snow (Birds LLC), and two chapbooks How (Octopus Books) and What Happened to Limbo (Pilot Books). Her poems can be found in Skein, Thethe, Sixth Finch, Wolf in a Field, Le Petite Zine, Forklift Ohio, Glitterpony, Diagram, Octopus, H_ngM_n and elsewhere.  She has a MFA from the University of Iowa where she was a Maytag Fellow. She teaches writing and literature at Elms College, poetry workshops at Flying Object and is publisher and editor of jubilat (the literary magazine) and at factory hollow press.She is an editor for notnostrums (notnostrums.com) and Factory Hollow Press. More poems can be found online (Octopus, Sixth Finch, Strange Machine) and in print (Invisible Ear, and, soon, Skein and SUPERMACHINE.)

• Holler, featuring Normandi Ellis, Roger Bonair-Agard, AlexanderSings

  • Al’s Bar

  • Wednesday April, 29, 2015

  • 8:00 PM

  • Open mic starts at 8:00pm

  • We celebrate national poetry month with the return of Normandi Ellis, author of Words on Water, and the debut of two-time National Poetry Slam Champion, Roger Bonair-Agard, his latest Bury My Clothes, a long list finalist for the National Book Award. Providing music is Louisville based old time/folk artist AlexanderSings! Alejandro Udisco Kentucki). As usual open mic opens and closes the show. Bring some extra bones for the Holler bucket. Support your local arts. See y'all there!
     

• Write or Die Poetry Slam (Presented by Bianca Spriggs/Hosted by the Raven House)

  • Ravenhouse 3229 Raven Cir, Lexington, Kentucky

  • Thursday April 30, 2015

  • 8:30pm, doors open at 8:00pm

  • Eight poets from around the state and region will compete in a three-round elimination spoken word competition for a first prize of $500 (sponsored by The Morris Book Shop) and a second prize of $300 (Sponsored by UnderMain). The feature and celebrity judge for the night is award-winning poet, Roger Bonair-Agard. Opening musical performances by Designer Flow and J. Cannon. DJ Warren Peace will be on the one's and two's. And special bonus, Thomas Kirkland, veteran slam emcee, will be dusting off his mic for the occasion! There will be a full spread, BYOB. Admission is $20. Capacity is 80 attendees, so get there early for this fast-paced, one-of-a-kind event! You can purchase tix in advance here: http://theravenhouse.brownpapertickets.com. A portion of the proceeds will go towards each of the performers that night as well as the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning!

• Roger Bonair-Agard Interview

  • William T. Young Auditorium

  • Thursday April 30th, 2015

  • 5:30pm

  • Poet and spoken-word artist Roger Bonair-Agard was born in Trinidad and Tobago and moved to the United States in 1987. His collections of poetry include Tarnish and Masquerade (2006); Gully (2010); and Bury My Clothes (2013), which was a long-list finalist for a National Book Award. A Cave Canem fellow, Bonair-Agard performs his work and leads workshops internationally. He is the cofounder and artistic director of the louderARTS Project and teaches poetry at the Cook County Temporary Juvenile Detention Facility in Chicago.
     

• Ekphrastic Poetry Prize DEADLINE

• The Art Museum at the University of Kentucky and the University of Kentucky MFA Program in Creative Writing present The Kentucky Poetry Festival’s Ekphrastic Poetry Prize. First prize: $100. Deadline: May 01st. Entries must pertain to the permanent collection, or a current or past exhibit at The Art Museum at the University of Kentucky. Please indicate the name of the work and the artist’s name with entry. Contest is open to all poets, excluding current MFA poetry students at the University of Kentucky. Entrants may submit up to 3 poems as a single attached file with the format firstname_lastname2015 to: kpfpoetrycontest@gmail.com. For inquiries contact us at kpfpoetrycontest@gmail.com

• Poetry in the Greenhouses

  • Michler's Florist, Greenhouses & Garden Design, 417 E Maxwell St, Lexington, KY 40508

  • Friday, May 01

  • 5:30pm

  • Readings by Steven Alvarez, Dan Howell, Leatha Kendrick, George Ella Lyon, Maurice Manning, Christopher McCurry, Kimberly Miller, Gurney Norman, Katerina Stoykova-Klemer, Richard Taylor, and Jeff Worley
  • Open mic to follow.

The second in the “Works in Progress Series” features Melissa Adler, Assistant Professor in the School of Library and Information Science. She will be discussing the introduction to her book manuscript, tentatively titled Perverse Subjects: Becoming Bodies of Literature in the Library. The book provides an account of the ways in which the Library Congress classification standards that organize research libraries in the U.S. and abroad have reproduced normative ideas about sexuality since the beginning of the 20^th century. The project challenges these classifications through the lens of perversion, echoing Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s call to become “perverse readers.”

Carol Mason (GWS) and Rusty Barrett (Linguistics) will serve as respondents. Attendees should email CST Director Dr. Marion Rust (marion.rust@uky.edu) for a copy of Dr. Adler’s paper.

The National Conference on Undergraduate Research is an annual student conference dedicated to promoting undergraduate research, scholarship, and creative activity in all fields of study. Unlike meetings of academic professional organizations, this gathering of young scholars welcomes presenters from institutions of higher learning from all corners of the academic curriculum. This annual conference creates a unique environment for the celebration and promotion of undergraduate student achievement, provides models of exemplary research and scholarship, and helps to improve the state of undergraduate education.

Learn more here.

Register at: http://craftwriting.as.uky.edu

This one day event will bring to UK brewers and professional writers from the craft beer industry. Craft beer, the annual production of under six million barrels of beer by small breweries, is one of the fastest growing areas of the food industry. According to the Brewers Association, craft beer provides over 108,000 jobs and its retail dollar value in 2012 was estimated at $10.2 billion. In the last twenty years, over 2,000 new breweries have come online, commanding almost 6% of the overall American beer market. These breweries have, in turn, helped revitalize city neighborhoods, generated new jobs in related industries, and played a key role in expanding digital and social media usage.

This event will showcase the professional writing – in print and digital media – that is dominant in the craft beer industry. Writing has played a major role in promoting the business of craft beer. Craft Writing will serve as an event that draws interdisciplinary attention to the ways industry utilizes writing – in various digital forms – to promote, inform, highlight, argue, market, brand, and foster relationships between products, consumers, and other relevant parties.

Featured Speakers:

Stan Hieronymus, author of For The Love of Hops, Brewing with Wheat, and Brew Like a Monk. Blogger at Appellation Beer and For the Love of Hops.

Julie Johnson, Co-owner of All About Beer, former Editor of All Bout Beer. Currently Technical and Contributing Editor.

Teri Fahrendorf, 25-year beer industry veteran, founder of the Pink Boots Society, author of beer related articles, 19 years brewmaster at Steelhead Brewing, Triple Rock Brewing and Golden Gate Brewing, and blogging gypsy “Road Brewer,”

Roger Baylor, owner of New Albanian Brewing, author of The Potable Curmudgeon.

Jeremy Cowan, owner of Shmaltz Brewing, author of Craft Beer Bar Mitzvah.

Mitch Steele, Brewmaster at Stone Brewing, author of IPA: Brewing Techniques, Recipes, and the Evolution of India Pale Ale.

Keynote speaker

Garrett Oliver, Editor of The Oxford Companion to Beer, author of The Brewmaster’s Table, regular contributor to All About Beer. Brewmaster at Brooklyn Brewery

Invisible War (2011), an Academy Award-nominated documentary, will be shown for free this Saturday morning, April 20, 2013,  at 10 AM at the Kentucky Theater.  This film documents the lives of women and men who have been sexually assaulted while serving in the U.S. military.  Several of the survivors have roots in Kentucky, and some of them will be at the screening to answer questions.  Come out, see the film, hear their stories.

Sponsored by UK Arts and Sciences, Anthropology, English, History, WRD (Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Media), American Studies and the Center for research on Violence Against Women (CRVAW)

A sign-up sheet is posted outside Julia Johnson's office door (1219 POT).  Please sign up to read a poem by you or by someone else.  Sign-up slots will be in 1/2 hour spots.  So, you will show up to read during your 1/2 hour.  Individual readings should be no longer than 3 minutes.  Invite your friends or just stop by to listen.

For more information contact julia.johnson@uky.edu

The Best of Both Worlds: Blended Learning in the Language Classroom”

Lecture by Dr. Fernando Rubio

Wednesday, March 06

2:30-4:30 pm

P.O.T 18^th floor, West End

Dr. Rubio has a  PhD in Spanish Linguistics from the State University of New York at Buffalo and he is currently teaching Spanish Linguistics at the University of Utah, where he is also Co-Director of the Second Language Teaching and Research Center. His research interests are in the areas of Applied Linguistics and Teaching Methodologies. In 2009 he was awarded the Utah System of Higher Education (USHE) Exemplary Faculty Use of Technology Award and in 2012 he received the ACTFL Award for Excellence in Foreign Language Instruction Using Technology. He has given talks, keynotes, and workshops on language and technology all over the country.  He has taught online and hybrid language courses for years, including the first foreign language MOOC^* ever taught (currently in progress).

He is the author of two textbooks, Tercer Milenio, Kendall-Hunt, 2009, and Juntos, Cengage (forthcoming) and editor of Hybrid Language Teaching and Learning: Exploring Theoretical, Pedagogical and Curricular Issues, Heinle, 2012.

(*) MOOC: Massive Open Online Course

Films of the Perestroika period--1980s-1990s