• Dept. of English & Theatre
  • MFA in Creative Writing
  • Derek Nikitas, Director
  • 393 Case Annex
  • 521 Lancaster Avenue
  • Eastern Kentucky University
  • Richmond, KY 40475
  • Phone: 859-622-3091
  • Russell Helms, Coordinator
  • 478 Case Annex
  • 521 Lancaster Avenue
  • Eastern Kentucky University
  • Richmond, KY 40475
  • Phone: 859-622-3171
Kim Edwards
Kim Edwards
 
Melissa Pritchard
Melissa Pritchard
 
Adam Day
Adam Day
 
Glen Retief
Glen Retief
 
Sena Jeter Naslund
Sena Jeter Naslund
 
Nancy Jensen
Nancy Jensen
 

Winter Residency

Lexington, Kentucky

January 1–January 8, 2012


2012 Residency Reading Schedule

Sun., Jan. 1 - Young Smith and R. Dean Johnson
Mon., Jan. 2 - Derek Nikitas and Julie Hensley
Tues., Jan. 3 - Adam Day
Wed., Jan. 4 - Melissa Pritchard
Thur., Jan. 5 - David Hale Smith, Jennifer Brehl, and Lisa Gallagher (afternoon) Kim Edwards (evening)
Fri., Jan. 6 - Glen Retief
Sat., Jan. 7 - Nancy Jensen
Sun., Jan. 8 - No Readings

All readings will be held in the Lexington Downtown HIlton at 7:30 p.m. except for KIm Edwards', who will read at ArtsPlace. Books will be available for sale and signing for all reading events.

Our 2011 Winter Residency in Lexington will feature novelist Kim Edwards. Kim Edwards grew up in Skaneateles, New York, in the heart of the Finger Lakes region. The oldest of four children, she graduated from Colgate University and the University of Iowa, where she received an MFA in Fiction and an MA in Linguistics. After completing her graduate work, she went with her husband to Asia, where they spent the next five years teaching, first on the rural east coast of Malaysia, then in a small city an hour south of Tokyo, and finally in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.


Click HERE for more info about Kim

During her time in Asia, Kim began to publish short fiction, and in 1990 her story “Sky Juice” won the Nelson Algren Award. Her stories and essays have since appeared in a wide range of periodicals, including Ploughshares, Zoetrope, Anteaus, Story, and The Paris Review. They have won many honors, including a National Magazine Award for Excellence in Fiction and a Pushcart Prize, as well as inclusion in The Best American Short Stories. Two of her stories have been performed at Symphony Space and broadcast on Public Radio International. Kim has also received support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Kentucky Arts Council, among others. Her story collection The Secrets of a Fire King was short-listed for the 1998 Pen/Hemingway Award.

Penguin will reissue The Secrets of a Fire King in 2007. Kim Edwards received a Whiting Writers’ Award in 2002. She has taught in the MFA programs at Warren Wilson and Washington University, and is currently an assistant professor at The University of Kentucky. Her novel, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, was selected for a Barnes and Noble Discovery Award and won the Kentucky Literary Award for Fiction in 2005. The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, a #1 New York Times Best Seller in the United States, will also be published in Italy, Japan, Brazil, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Portugal, Spain, Poland, China, Taiwan, Israel, Turkey, and the United Kingdom.


Visiting Writers

This year's Winter Residency lineup of visiting writers includes novelists Kim Edwards (The Memory Keeper's Daughter), Melissa Pritchard (The Odditorium), Nancy Jensen (The Sisters), and Sena Jeter Naslund (Ahab's Wife, Adam & Eve). We also welcome poet Adam Day (Badger, Apocrypha), nonfiction writer Glen Retief (The Jack Bank)


Melissa Pritchard
A recipient of numerous awards, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Howard Foundation at Brown University, the Illinois Arts Council, Writer’s Voice YMCA and Scotland’s Hawthornden International Fellowship, MELISSA PRITCHARD teaches at Arizona State University and has served as judge for The Flannery O’Connor Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award. She sits on the Advisory Board of the Afghan Women's Writing Project (AWWP), and is the founder of The Ashton Goodman Grant, working with AWWP to provide funding for the education and literacy of Afghan women and girls. Her books include four short story collections, The Odditorium (forthcoming 2012 from Bellevue Literary Press), Spirit Seizures, The Instinct for Bliss, and Disappearing Ingenue; three novels, Phoenix, Selene of the Spirits, and Late Bloomer; as well as Devotedly, Virginia, a biography of Arizona philanthropist Virginia Galvin Piper.
Adam Day
ADAM DAY is the recipient of a 2010 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship for Badger, Apocrypha. He is also the recipient of a 2011 Pushcart Prize, and a 2011 PEN Emerging Writers Award. His work owes a debt to the editors of the Boston Review, Guernica, AGNI, Forklift: Ohio, The Kenyon Review, and others. He is the recipient of a Kentucky Arts Council grant. He coordinates The Baltic Writing Residency in Latvia, and is an editor for the literary and comics journal, Catch Up. Currently, he is writer-in-residence at Earlham College.
Glen Retief
A native South African now living and teaching in Pennsylvania, GLEN RETIEF will read from and discuss his highly acclaimed memoir, The Jack Bank, a mesmerizing, powerful, and deeply moving coming-of-age story. Set against a backdrop of a subcontinent in transition, The Jack Bank explores what it was like for a privileged white boy to grow up in a pitiless society. Retief is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Susquehanna University. He has been published in The St. Petersburg Times and the Pittsburgh Courier-Post, along with a variety of literary journals. He has been awarded a James Michener Writing Fellowship and the AWP Intro Journals Award for Creative Nonfiction, and he lives in Sunbury, Pennsylvania.
Sena Jeter Naslund
New York Times bestselling author SENA JETER NASLUND's most recent novel is Abundance: A Novel of Marie Antoinette; she has published six previous books of fiction. The daughter of a physician father and a musician mother, she grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, with her two older brothers: Marvin D. Jeter, an archaeologist and author of Edward Palmer's Arkansaw Mounds; and John Sims Jeter, a retired engineer and author of the novel And the Angels Sang.The Jeter family also lived briefly in Loredo, West Virginia, and Jackson, Louisiana. Naslund attended public schools, Norwood Elementary and Phillips High School, in Birmingham and graduated from Birmingham Southern College where she received the B.B. Comer Medal in English. She earned a Master's Degree and a doctorate from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.
Nancy Jensen
NANCY JENSEN’s work has appeared in numerous literary journals, and her first book, Window, a collection of short stories and essays, was published by Fleur-de-Lis Press in 2009. She has been awarded an Artist Enrichment Grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and an Al Smith Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council. Nancy shares her home with eight rescued cats and her dog Gordy, who is her partner on a pet therapy team with Pawsibilities Unleashed of Kentucky, visiting hospitals, nursing homes, assisted-living facilities, and daycare centers. When she isn’t writing or enjoying the company of her furred family, she teaches as a member of the core faculty in the MFA in Writing Program at Eastern Kentucky University. The Sisters is her first novel.

Visiting Editors and Agents

This year's Winter Residency lineup of visiting editors and agents includes David Hale Smith (Inkwell Management), Lisa Gallagher (Sandford J. Greenburger Associates), and senior editor Jennifer Brehl (William Morrow). Their panel presentation on Thursday, the 5th, is a must-attend event. Do not miss it.


Residency Faculty

Residency faculty from Eastern Kentucky University this year will include Julie Hensley, Nancy Jensen, R. Dean Johnson, Derek Nikitas, and Young Smith.

Residency Activities

The Winter Residency held each year in Lexington, Kentucky, is ten days of intensive workshops, lectures, readings, and author socials. Focusing on individual writing, MFA students experience the richness of a full semester of writing craft and critical analysis of their and their peers' creative works. The typical day includes morning workshops in poetry, fiction, or creative nonfiction. Workshops are led by program faculty and visiting writers. The afternoon is dedicated to craft lectures, readings, and organizational meetings. Informal dinners with faculty and visiting writers are followed by that night's reading featuring either faculty, visiting writers, or students. One night of the residency is dedicated solely to student readings. Each day is concluded with an informal social with faculty, students, and visiting writers.


Residency Facilities

The Winter Residencies are currently held at the Lexington Downtown Hilton, which provides special student discounts to those who choose to stay at the Hilton. Students are not required to stay at the HIlton, but doing so enriches the overall residency experience. All classes are held within the Hilton. Our evening reading with Kim Edwards will take place off-site at ArtsPlace.


Residencies and Degree Requirements

Four sections of ENW 800 Writing Residency are required to obtain the MFA. Each section is 3 credit hours. Each Winter Residency in Lexington earns 3 credits. The Summer Residency earns either 3 credits (if you stay two weeks) or 6 credits (if you stay four weeks). Two month-long Summer Residencies will fulfill the residency requirement. You may also combine credits from Winter and Summer Residencies, but a total of 12 hours must be earned (ENW 800).


Lexington, Kentucky

Thirty minutes north of Eastern Kentucky University, Lexington provides a central and well-appointed location for the Winter Residency. The Lexington Downtown Hilton, located in the heart of the city, is within walking distance of a wide variety of restaurants and social venues. Considered "The Horse Capital of the World," the green, rolling lands around the city of 270,000 are home to numerous horse farms, training facilties, tracks, and historic parks. In the heart of the Bluegrass Region, Lexington is also home to a thriving music scene and supports a rich literary community.