February 21 and 22, the University of Alabama faculty/writer Brian Oliu and four Alabama undergraduate writers will visit Ball State University to exchange ideas about creative writing, visit our Creative Writing in the Community program, and also visit the Virginia B. Ball Center for Creative Inquiry.

On Tuesday night, February 22, BSU will host a reading where the visiting Alabama writers will showcase their original creative works. The reading is at 7:30 p.m. in Bracken Library, room 104. Please come out and support our visiting authors from the South!

From the end of March to the beginning of April, four creative writing students from BSU will be visiting the University of Alabama and The Slash Pine Poetry Festival, accompanied by professors Sean Lovelace and Matt Mullins. Here’s a short excerpt from Slash Pine Press about their festival:

“In April, The Slash Pine Poetry Festival brings over forty national and regional poets together for a two-day extravaganza of poetry. The festival highlights the public and democratic nature of creative work, refusing to privilege one form or aesthetic over another, and presenting diverse voices in non-traditional, communally-accessible spaces. The festival itself spreads widely across a range of venues, emphasizing that art is intimately connected to place”.

Feel free to check out this firsthand account of the first SPPF in 2009.

The BSU undergraduate students participating in the exchange have started a fundraiser on Kickstarter.com to cover the costs of their trip. Kickstarter features donation increments that award certain prizes determined by the dollar amount. For instance, in the case of these students, poems/stories, chapbooks, and broadsides created by the students themselves number among the prizes awarded. You can view the students’ Kickstarter here.