Sheri Reynolds, one of our professors in the MFA Creative Writing Program, will be giving the College of Arts and Letters Spring 2011 Senior Scholar Lecture this year on Tuesday, March 22, 2011. She’ll be giving the lecture, titled, “A Story Untold: One Writer’s Exploration of Anxiety and Imagination” in the Burgess Room (9024) of the Batten Arts & Letters building (BAL).

The reception will begin at 3:30 and the lecture will start at 4.

We’ll see you there, right?

the pilgrimage of the ODU MFA faculty and students to DC for AWP 2011 will be well-underway. You can find us at table F31 in Hall A (check this nifty map if you want to hunt us down more efficiently). You can also catch our MFA faculty at the “Barely South: Writers from the MFA Program at Old Dominion University” panel, which will be held on Thursday, February 3rd from 1:30-2:45PM in the Hampton Ball Room located in the Omni Shoreham’s east lobby (details @ Facebook).

Speaking of the MFA faculty–we’ve got a real treat for you; drop by our table on Friday for book signings. You can catch John McManus, Luisa Igloria & Blake Bailey at 11AM, and Sheri Reynolds, Mike Pearson & Tim Seibles at 2PM.

If all else fails, just look for the cool kids.

Welcome, you street-smart, word-wily masterminds–BSR’s timely craft issue is here. Way back in October, we had the good fortune to make the acquaintance of the readers for the 33rd annual ODU Literary Festival; not only did we have the good sense to sit down, shut up and silence our cell phones, but we also talked our way into a real coup–craft interviews with almost all of the authors who came in for the event. While we were at first inclined to spirit this treasure-trove off to our very-own deserted island, we’ve instead decided to share it with the lot of you. So go on, quit wasting time–hit up the craft-interview bonanza (plus poems, stories and excerpts from the visiting writers!)

P.S. Those of you with submissions in, now that our third issue is in the bag, we’ll be turning our attention towards pending notifications.

Congratulations to ODU MFA Alumna Princess Perry on receiving a Pushcart nomination from Kweli Journal and current MFA Creative Writing Program Director Luisa Igloria on her nomination from Asia Writes.

Behind the production of the Barely South Review are the students and faculty of the MFA Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University. If you’ve thought of joining us, we encourage you to look closely at our outstanding faculty roster in the different genres – core faculty members Sheri Reynolds, John McManus and Janet Peery (fiction), Luisa Igloria and Tim Seibles (Poetry), and Michael Pearson (Nonfiction). We also have a Writer-in-Residence Program which brings one writer of national reputation to campus each semester for two weeks. Writers-in-residence have included Bonnie Jo Campbell, Blake Bailey, Brian Turner, Denise Duhamel, Maribeth Fischer, Greg Bottoms, Kent Nelson, Richard Jones, Eloise Klein Healy, Sandra Scofield, Earl Swift, and Marilyn Chin.

Applicants to the MFA Creative Writing Program must have completed a bachelor’s degree from an accredited institution with a minimum GPA of 3.0 AND a minimum of 24 credit hours in English with at least a B Average. The GRE is also required. Students who have not yet completed 24 undergraduate hours in English may be admitted provisionally and make up the required number of undergraduate English credits at ODU.

Admissions & program links:
General (degree) admission process
Non-degree admission process
Additional Program information

The MFA Creative Writing Program at ODU typically has 10 competitive, funded assistantships (which include tuition waivers — in the past we have been fortunate to have the waivers cover most if not all of the tuition) from the College of Arts and Letters.

Students must indicate at the time of application to the program that they are interested in applying for funding. Students who eventually wind up in these positions must be registered for a full graduate load (9 credits a semester). Typically, assistantships are for teaching (at least 1 class per semester); or for working in the Writing Tutorial Services; other assistantships are research assistant positions. Again, please note that these numbers are average and may vary from academic year to year depending on the availability of college funds. Assistantships require 20 hours of work per week.

Seth Abramson’s list of 27 underrated creative-writing MFA programs was published over at The Huffington Post last week. ODU made the cut, as did VCU.

See what Seth had to say in his article, The Top 25 Underrated Creative Writing MFA Programs

At age 95, Old Dominion University Professor Emeritus of English Ernest Rhodes has published a memoir of growing up in an orphans’ home-school in Illinois, and will give a reading from the book at noon Tuesday, Sept. 21, at the University Village Bookstore.

In “A Coal Miner’s Family at Mooseheart,” Rhodes recalls the period 1919-39, and particularly the years starting in 1926 when, as an 11-year-old, he and his three siblings moved with their recently widowed mother from a small coal-mining town in West Virginia to the City of Children at Mooseheart, Ill., a unique home-school near Chicago run by the Moose fraternity, which still operates today.

Read more at:
http://www.odu.edu/ao/news/index.php?todo=details&id=23950

We’ve spent the past week dodging hurricanes and typesetting poems which can only mean one thing–it’s September. Look for the second issue of BSR to drop in ten days.

Credit: John Campbell

Bonnie Jo Campbell, the ODU MFA Creative Writing Program’s Fall 2010 writer-in-residence, will spend two weeks at Old Dominion early in the semester. Campbell’s short-story collection, American Salvage, was a finalist for the 2009 National Book Award in fiction, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award in fiction. While on campus, Campbell will work with students in the creative-writing program, give a talk on craft, and give a reading.

Bonnie Jo Campbell’s general schedule is as follows:

September 27 –October 4:
- Writer in Residence will meet in individual tutorials with ODU MFA Creative Writing students
- Craft Talk (open to the ODU community and general public)–Anecdotes: The Littlest Stories–(12:00 nn – 1:00 pm Wednesday, 29 September, Charles Burgess Room(BAL 9024), 9th floor BAL, ODU main campus)
- Reading at the 33rd Annual ODU Literary Festival: Monday 4 October, 2:00 pm at the ODU Village Bookstore (45th St. corner Monarch Way)

Blake Bailey won one of seven prestigious awards for literature in 2010 from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His book Cheever: a Life won the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award, the Francis Parkman Prize, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Blake will be teaching courses in fall 2010 for the MFA Creative Writing Program at ODU.

Bailey, a literary biographer, has also written a well-received biography of Richard Yates (A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates), as well as a series of articles for Slate about the loss of his home and possessions in hurricane Katrina. He and his family now make their home in Norfolk.