On my way to Alabama: April 19-20 

My thanks to Lindsay Hodgens and the Alabama Writers' Forum for the great review of Peck and Pock: A Graphic Poem: http://www.writersforum.org/news_and_reviews/review_archives.html/article/2013/04/04/peck-and-pock-a-graphic-poem

I'll be in Montgomery April 19:  as part of the Alabama Book Festival's program, I'll be teaching a class for Alabama writing teachers at Troy University. Then on April 20, I'm I'm looking forward to sitting on a panel where I'll discuss Peck and Pock: A Graphic Poem alongside with Lila Quintero Weaver who will talk about her own beautiful graphic memoir DARKROOM: A MEMOIR IN BLACK AND WHITE. Here's Lila's bio from the Alabama Book Festival website. Hope to see some friends in Montgomery!

Lila Quintero Weaver  -  Darkroom: A Memoir in Black and White  (graphic memoir) Lila was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and immigrated to the U.S. with her family when she was five; Alabama has been her home ever since. A self-taught artist with experience in portraiture, calligraphy, landscape and other genres of painting, she is a graduate of the University of Alabama. Darkroom: A Memoir in Black & White is her first major publication and has been named a finalist for the Small Press Expo 2012 Ignatz Award for Promising New Talent and for the graphic-novel category in the 2012 Cybils. The Children's Literature and Reading Special Interest Group designated the book as a winner in its 2013 Notable Books for a Global Society.

http://www.writersforum.org/programs/alabama_book_festival.html

Words and Art: A Collaboration

I was lucky to be able to talk about collaborating with illustrator AJ Reinhart on my newest publication Peck and Pock: A Graphic Poem at Spalding's MFA Residency last month, but we were just two of seven panelists talking about the collaborations between artists and writers. Printmaker Mary Lou Hess discussed  her collaborations with two other writers on the panel: Mary Lou and Dianne Aprile created The Eye Is Not Enough, a hand-letter press book that includes a beautiful long essay by Dianne with accompanying original full-color prints by Mary Lou; she also provided prints for current Kentucky Poet Laureate Maureen Morehead's A Sense of Time Left. Both of those books were printed at Larkspur Press, the hand-letter press of Gray Zeitz in Monterey, Kentucky.  I don't know a writer in Kentucky who wouldn't jump at the chance to have Gray publish a book. If you don't know about Gray's work, next time you are in a Kentucky bookstore, ask someone to point you in the direction of Gray's books. It's a pleasure to hold any of his books in your hands.

After 911, writer Richard Goodman used his bike to get through many of the blocked streets around the collapsed Trade Center towers and The Bicycle Diaries, a record of his witness right after the attack, was published to mark the tenth year memoriam. Richard collaborated with renown artist Gaylord Shanilac on the beautiful book, which features remarkable engravings of New York by Gaylord.

Here are some photos of that event. Thanks to my colleague fiction writer Jody Lisberger for taking and sending them.

 

Gaylord Shanilac, Richard Goodman, AJ Reinhart, Kathleen Driskell

Gaylord Shanilac, Richard Goodman, AJ Reinhart, Kathleenn Driskell

 Dianne Aprile, Mary Lou Hess, Maureen Morehead

A great audience of Spalding MFA Students

Spalding Screenwriting faculty member Larry Brenner signs huge deal with Universal Studios

Congratulations go out to Larry Brenner, Spalding MFA screenwriting faculty member (and MFA alum), for selling his black-listed script Bethlehem to Universal Studios. The deal was announced yesterday and details reveal that Tim Roth will produce and Cedric Nicolas-Troyan will direct.

Larry's having a great year! He's also working with Sony on a script for the adaptation of Angelology and will have an Off-Broadway play launched this fall. Even as a student, Larry has been a great supporter of the Spalding brief-residency MFA in Writing Program, and we're thrilled he is having such over the moon success with his work - and thrilled, too, that he's now teaching for our program. Below, see a picture of Larry reading his play with another student Amina McIntyre while we were in London in 2007 for our Spalding MFA residency abroad.


To read more about Larry's big Hollywood deal, visit http://www.deadline.com/tag/larry-brenner/