General Information

For over a decade, the Ball State Creative Writing Program’s In Print Festival of First Books has brought authors who’ve just published their first book and a literary editor/publisher to campus for a two day event featuring a reading, classroom visits, and a panel discussion/Q&A on literary editing and publishing.

This year’s festival, to be held in AJ 175 at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, March 20th and Thursday, March 21st, features:

• Allison Joseph—editor/publisher
• Chen Chen—poet
• Maria Romasco Moore—fiction writer
• Dustin Parsons—creative nonfiction writer

About the Speakers

Allison Joseph lives, writes, and teaches in Carbondale, Illinois, where she is part of the creative writing faculty at Southern Illinois University. She serves as editor and poetry editor of Crab Orchard Review, moderator of the Creative Writers Opportunities List (you should join!), and director of Writers In Common, an all-ages inclusive writers conference launching in summer 2018. Her books and chapbooks include fifteen titles. Her latest full-length collection of poems, Confessions of a Barefaced Woman, was published in 2018 by Red Hen Press.

Interviews:

•    “’The things that hold you back can often help you’: An Interview with Poet Allison Joseph” from Long River Review
•    “’Always on the Lookout’: An Interview with Allison Joseph” from Ploughshares
•    “An Interview with Allison Joseph” from Atticus Review
•    “Allison Joseph, Poet” from Lunch Ticket

Crab Orchard Review:

•    Volume 23, Number 2 (October 2018)
•    Volume 22, Double Issue (2018)
•    Volume 23, Number 1 (December 2017)

Poetry:

•    “My Father’s Kites”
•    “Soul Train”
•    “Sundown Ghazal” and “Chain”
•    To read a piece not featured in this blog post, check out Words to Go below the creative writing bulletin board on the second floor of Robert Bell!

Classroom Visit:

• Allison Joseph to visit Silas Hansen’s 489 at 5:00 on Wednesday, March 20th (Student Center, Room 303)

Chen Chen is the author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, which won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, the GLCA New Writers Award, and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry.  His work has appeared in many publications, including Poetry, Tin House, The Best American Poetry, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. Chen is the 2018-2020 Jacob Ziskind Poet-in-Residence at Brandeis University.

Interviews:

•    “Sometimes a Poem is a Home: An Interview with Chen Chen” from Winter Tangerine
•    “An Interview with Chen Chen” from wilderness
•    “’Queer People are Making Beautiful Worlds:’ Chen Chen on His Debut Poetry Collection” from Out
•    “Conversation: Chen Chen Writes” from Sine Theta Magazine

Poetry:

•    “Self-Portrait as So Much Potential”
•    “I’m not a religious person but”
•    “Winter”
•    “If I should die tomorrow, please note that I will miss the particular”
•    To read a poem not featured in this blog post, check out Words to Go below the creative writing bulletin board on the second floor of Robert Bell!

Classroom Visit:

• Thursday, 03/21, 2:00-3:15 in Student Center Room 301

Maria Romasco Moore’s stories have appeared in DIAGRAM, Hobart, Interfictions, and the Lightspeed anthology Women Destroy Science Fiction. Ghostographs, an interconnected collection of flash fiction inspired by vintage photographs, came out with Rose Metal Press in November. Her first novel, Some Kind of Animal, will be published by Delacorte Press in 2020. She is a graduate of the Clarion West Writer’s Workshop and has an MFA from Southern Illinois University. She currently lives in Columbus, OH with her partner and two black cats. She is an instructor at Columbus College of Art and Design.

Interviews/Craft Essays:

•      “Unconventional Ghosts: Playing with Forms in Fiction, a Roundtable with Maria Romasco Moore, Nino Cipri, and Karin Tidbeck” from Entropy
•      “Maria Romasco Moore’s Playlist for Her Novella ‘Ghostographs’” from largehearted boy
•      “What Silent Film and Found Photographs Can Show Us About Writing” from Literary Hub

Stories:

•    “Mabel”
•    “My Father”
•    “Peel”
•    “Sample”
•    To read a piece not featured in this blog post, check out Words to Go below the creative writing bulletin board on the second floor of Robert Bell!

Class Visit:

• Sean Lovelace’s 409 at 2:00 on Thursday, March 21st (Student Center, Room 305)

Dustin Parsons is the author of Exploded View: Essays on Fatherhood with Diagrams (University of Georgia Press). He is the winner of the Laurel Review Fiction Prize and the American Literary Review Fiction Prize as well as a New York Fine Arts and Ohio Art Grant in nonfiction. He teaches at the University of Mississippi.

Interviews/Craft Essays:

•      “A Conversation with Dustin Parsons” from Literary Mama
•      “In Conversation: Aimee Nezhukumatathil and Dustin Parsons” from Proximity
•      “’The Names of the Flowers That Deer Dislike’: An Interview with Dustin Parsons” from The Collagist
•      “Dustin Parsons on Dropping Off” from Essay Daily

Essays:

•    “Pumpjack”
•    “Mousetrap”
•    “Fruit Fly Extermination” and “Geode”
•    “Take an Island, Give an Island Back”
•    To read a piece not featured in this blog post, check out Words to Go below the creative writing bulletin board on the second floor of Robert Bell!

Class Visit:

• Todd McKinney’s 406 at 9:30 on Thursday March 21st (Student Center, Room 303)

This event is free and open to the public.

For more information contact Dr. Matt Mullins, Director of Creative Writing at mbmullins@bsu.edu or visit the English Department’s blog.