Spring 2012
MONTGOMERY COUNTY LITERARY ARTS COUNCIL
WRITERS IN PERFORMANCE SCHEDULE
Please put these dates on your calendar today.

Whether you write fiction, non-fiction or poetry, this outstanding series is for you. Featured authors read from and discuss their work, followed by Q & A, refreshments and opportunities for book signing. All events are free and open to the public.

February 16, 7:00 PM, LSC-Montgomery Library, 7:00 PM

KURT HEINZELMAN (Poetry) was the Founding Co-Editor of The Poetry Miscellany and is currently the Advisory Editor of Bat City Review. He has been publishing poetry for thirty years in such journals as Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Georgia Review, Massachusetts Review, Marlboro Review, and Southwest Review. His poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and selected for the Borestone Mountain Poetry Award. His first two poetry collections The Halfway Tree and Black Butterflies were finalists for the Natalie Ornish Poetry Award of the Texas Institute of Letters; a third collection, All the Salsas of Calamity, is forthcoming in 2010. His scholarship, which has won various awards, is in the fields of British Romanticism and economic and cultural history.

March 22nd, Thursday, LSC-Library, 7:00 PM

RICK BASS was born in Fort Worth, Texas, and grew up in Houston, the son of a geologist. He studied petroleum geology at Utah State University and while working as a petroleum geologist in Jackson, Mississippi, began writing short stories on his lunch breaks. In 1987, he moved with his wife, the artist Elizabeth Hughes Bass, to Montana’s remote Yaak Valley and became an active environmentalist, working to protect his adopted home from the destructive encroachment of roads and logging. He serves on the board of both the Yaak Valley Forest Council and Round River Conservation Studies and continues to live with his family on a ranch in Montana, actively engaged in saving the American wilderness.

Bass received the PEN/Nelson Algren Award in 1988 for his first short story, “The Watch,” and won the James Jones Fellowship Award for his novel Where the Sea Used To Be. His novel The Hermit’s Story was a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year in 2000. The Lives of Rocks was a finalist for the Story Prize and was chosen as a Best Book of the Year in 2006 by the Rocky Mountain News. Bass’s stories have also been awarded the Pushcart Prize and the O. Henry Award and have been collected in The Best American Short Stories.

Improbable Worlds, an anthology of Texas and Louisiana Poets, April 19, 7:00PM, LSC-Montgomery Library
Ninety-two poets from Texas and Louisiana contributed work in response to the question, “Given our noisy marketplace of belief, how or where can the sacred be found?”

Several of the poets included in this anthology will read selected poems from the anthology.

Bruce Noll, May 10, 3:00pm, LSC-Montgomery

PURE GRASS is a dramatic program created by Bruce Noll. The program is composed entirely of excerpts from Whitman's Leaves of Grass and weaves together many of the poet's themes. Since the first performance in 1970, PURE GRASS has undergone many changes but Noll always strives to represent the spirit of Walt Whitman in his oral interpretation of this timeless work of literature. Bruce Noll is a poet and professor of education who has presented Whitman's poetry from Hawaii to Iceland for more than 30 years. http://www.unm.edu/~banoll/

GATHERING OF POETS, MAY 10, 7:00 PM, THE CORNER PUB
Twenty distinguished poets lead by Texas Poet Laureate Dave Parsons, will read their favorite Walt Whitman poem and one of their own.

***Writers in Performance is made possible through the support of Lone Star College Montgomery (SWIRL/library), Conroe Commission on the Arts & Culture, Montgomery County Literary Arts Council & Good Books in the Woods.

Contacts: Cliff Hudder (936) 273-7391 or Dave Parsons (936)524-6537