2012 Scissortail: The Poster

2012 Scissortail: Author Biographies

Dorothy Alexander is a publisher, storyteller, and author of four collections of poetry: The Dust Bowl Revisited, Borrowed Dust, Rough Drafts, and Lessons From an Oklahoma Girlhood, a collection of art and poetry. She also writes non-fiction stories and essays, has edited two collections of oral history about her home community in western Oklahoma, and is the facilitator of the poetry readings at the annual Woody Guthrie Folk Festival in Okemah, Oklahoma. Publication of her memoir about the illness and death of her son is scheduled for late 2012. In a previous life, she was an attorney and municipal judge for thirty-seven years.

Rilla Askew divides her time between New York and Oklahoma. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies, including World Literature Today, Nimrod, and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. Askew’s first novel, The Mercy Seat, was a PEN/Faulkner finalist and received the Oklahoma Book Award in 1998. Her novel about the Tulsa Race Riot, Fire in Beulah, received the American Book Award in 2001 and was selected for Oklahoma's One Book One State program, in 2007. Her most recent novel, Harpsong, received the Western Heritage Award, the Oklahoma Book Award, the Violet Crown Award, and the Willa Cather Award from Women Writing the West. Askew received a 2009 Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is currently serving as Artist in Residence in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the University of Central Oklahoma.

Phil Poulter, of TSTC Waco, has aptly described Alan Berecka’s poetry as that of a time worn child or a wise assed mystic. Berecka makes a living as a librarian at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi. He has published poems in many journals and webzines including The Texas Review, The American Literary Review, Ruminate and the Christian Century. He has published two collections of poems, The Comic Flaw (NeoNuma Arts, 2009) and Remembering the Body (Mongrel Empire Press, 2011). To learn more about the poet and his work, please visit www.alanberecka.com.

2012 Scissortail: Schedule of Readings

Scissortail Creative Writing Festival
7th Annual: April 5 – 7, 2012
East Central University – Ada, Oklahoma

Thursday, April 5

I. 9:30 – 10: 45 Estep Auditorium

Jennifer Kidney, Norman, Oklahoma
Road Work Ahead
Rayshell Clapper, Seminole State College
Letter from an Oklahoma Prison
Timothy Bradford, Tulsa University
Nomads with Samsonite

II. 11:00 – 12: 15 Estep Auditorium

Larry Thomas, Alpine, Texas
The Red, Candle-lit Darkness
Dorothy Alexander, Oklahoma City
The Fractured Land: An Elegy
Jonathan Stalling, University of Oklahoma
Yingelishi

*** Lunch ***

Scissortail Hotel Rooms: 2012

Once again, The Holiday Inn Express has been designated as the official festival hotel. A special rate of $85/night is available to you and your guests attending festival. Please identify the Scissortail Creative Writing Festival with the hosts when you make arrangements.

For reservations call Holiday Inn Express Hotel & Suites of Ada at 580-310-9200 or email holidayinnexpressada@cableone.net. (If there is any confusion, ask for Olivia).

You are advised to make hotel arrangements early. Ada has a shortage of quality rooms, and you never know when a rodeo will come to town. April is a busy month, and there will likely be competition for the rooms.

All the best

Ken

The Third Annual Page One Literary Art Gallery

(From October 2009 issue of Frieze.)

Submissions are now being accepted for the ThirdAnnual Page One Literary Art Gallery, which will be open for viewing on one night only: Friday, April 6th, 2012, from 7:30 p.m. to 10 p. m. at the Ada Arts and Heritage Center at 400 S. Rennie Street in Ada, Oklahoma. 

Submissions:

· are welcomed from any writers--emerging or emerged--who would like to get in on the Scissortail vibe;

· may be in any creative writing genre (poetry, flash fiction, graphic fiction, excerpt from a longer work, etc.);

· must not be previously published;

· must be limited to one submission per author;

· must include author’s name, school affiliation (if any) and status (student, teacher, etc., if applicable) on a separate sheet;

· may be submitted via e-mail (as a Word attachment), snail mail (see addresses below) or dropped off in the door box in at ECU in the Horace Mann Building, room 316A;

· must be submitted by 1 p.m. on Friday, March 30th;

· will be displayed at the Ada Arts and Heritage Center and may also be displayed on this website and at ecuenglishtalk;

· must be limited to a single page. Submissions that run longer than a page may be displayed in full on ecu’s englishtalk website, but when determining awards, judges will only consider the first page of the entry and only the first page of the entry will be displayed at the Ada Arts and Heritage Center.

"Consecration of the Emperor Napoleon I " (1805-2807) by Jacques-Louis David

The authors of outstanding submissions:

· will be identified by our panel of faculty judges;

· will be awarded with gift certificates designated for the purchase of books (authors scheduled to appear in the Scissortail reading program will not be in the running for these awards);

· must be in attendance at the Scissortail Wrap when the awards are distributed, one hour after the conclusion of the reading presented by Scissortail's featured speaker on Friday, April 6th, 2012 at the Ada Arts and Heritage Center;

· send your submissions to: sbenton@ecok.edu (subject line: Page One Literary Art Gallery) or mail to Steve Benton at 1100 E. 14^th Street, PMB B-7, East Central University, Ada, Oklahoma 74820-6999.

This event enjoys the sponsorship and support of Literati (ECU’s English Student Club), Originals (ECU’s student-run creative writing journal), ECU’s Sigma Tau Delta chapter(International English Honor Society), and the Scissortail Creative Writing Festival. We look forward to seeing you soon!

Scissortail Submission Guidelines

East Central University, Ada, Oklahoma

Presents the 7th Annual

Scissortail Creative Writing Festival

April 5 - April 7, 2012

Featuring: Norbert Krapf & Natasha Trethewey

The Scissortail Festival celebrates published and emerging authors reading from their original creative works of poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction.

Guidelines: Please read closely and follow explicitly. Please look at your calendar before submitting! Due to the increasing popularity of the festival, it is very difficult to accommodate special scheduling requests. Please do not ask.

* Reading sessions feature a mixture of authors and genre.

* Sessions will consist of 3 or 4 readers per session. Authors should plan for either 15 or 20 minutes total time at the mic (including prose) depending on the session.

* No workshops, how-to, propaganda or pre-arranged panels are acceptable.

* Email submissions encouraged. Submit: 1) complete contact information 2) the title of your program and sample/s of work to be considered 3) a paragraph-length biographical narrative, including publications and significant accomplishments.

* Deadline for submission: January 9, 2012. Reading schedule will be set in early February.

* Send email submissions to: khada@ecok.edu. Identify “Scissortail Submission” in the subject line. You may also mail submissions to: Dr. Hada, Department of English & Languages, East Central University, 1100 E. 14th St. Ada, OK 74820.

* Please check your calendar before submitting. Participants are not charged registration fees. See http://www.ecuscissortail.blogspot.com for information & updates.

* Special thanks to primary supporters: Dr. Darryl Fisher, East Central University Foundation, Inc., Oklahoma Arts Council and ECU Cultural Activities Committee.

Scissortail 2012

The annual Scissortail Creative Writing Festival is back for its seventh year with featured authors Norbert Krapf and Natasha Trethewey. In addition, more than 50 regional, published and emerging authors will make presentations during the three-day festival, April 5 – April 7, 2012 on the campus of East Central University in Ada, Oklahoma. All sessions are free and open to the public.

Norbert Krapf, emeritus professor of English at Long Island University and native of Jasper, a German community in southern Indiana hill country, moved to Indianapolis from the New York area in 2004 and since then has published five books and a CD with jazz pianist-composer Monika Herzig, Imagine. He also collaborates with bluesman Gordon Bonham, with whom he started working as part of the Hoosier Dylan show produced by folksinger and actor Tim Grimm. He serves on the board of Etheridge Knight, Inc., whose mission is to bring the arts to the underserved, and as Indiana Poet Laureate 2008-10 had a mission of reuniting poetry and song. In 2012 Indiana University Press will release his collaboration with photographer Richard Fields, Songs in Sepia and Black and White. Included is a section of 26 poems about music, “Practically with the Band.” He is the recipient of a recent Creative Renewal Fellowship from the Arts Council of Indianapolis to combine poetry and music, with an emphasis on the blues, and Garrison Keillor has read a poem of his on The Writer’s Almanac on NPR.

Other recent publications are Invisible Presence, with photographer Darryl Jones (IU Press, 2006), Bloodroot: Indiana Poems, with photographer David Pierini (IU Pr., 2008), and Sweet Sister Moon (WordTech Editions, 2009), celebrations of women, as well as the prose memoir The Ripest Moments: A Southern Indiana Childhood (Indiana Historical Society Press, 2008). He was awarded the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award by the Poetry Society of America, has twice served as a Senior Fulbright Professor of American Poetry at the Universities of Freiburg (1980-81) and Erlangen-Nuremberg (1988-89) Germany, and his The Country I Come From (Archer Books, 2002) was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. More info about him, including videos and audio files of his readings and recitations with musicians, is available at www.krapfpoetry.com and on Facebook. His books are available from www.amazon.com and directly from the publishers at http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/, http://www.wordtechweb.com/krapf.html, and http://www.timebeing.com/shop/authors/norbert-krapf.

Natasha Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, in 1966. She earned an M.A. in poetry from Hollins University and M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Massachusetts. Her first collection of poetry, Domestic Work (2000), was selected by Rita Dove as the winner of the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African American poet and won both the 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry.

Since then, she has published two more collections of poetry, including Native Guard (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), which received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and Bellocq's Ophelia (2002). Her work has appeared in Agni, The American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry, Callaloo, Gettysburg Review, The Massachusetts Review, New England Review, North American Review, and The Southern Review, among other magazines and anthologies.

In her introduction to Domestic Work, Rita Dove said, "Trethewey eschews the Polaroid instant, choosing to render the unsuspecting yearnings and tremulous hopes that accompany our most private thoughts—reclaiming for us that interior life where the true self flourishes and to which we return, in solitary reverie, for strength."

Trethewey's honors include the Bunting Fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. She is Professor of English at Emory University where she holds the Phillis Wheatley Distinguished Chair in Poetry.