MFA Faculty Members Angie Estes, Stephen Haven, and Robert Root Reading

The MFA program at Ashland University presents the summer residency's summer reading series. MFA faculty members Angie Estes (runner-up for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize), Stephen Haven (co-Ohio Poet of the Year and Director of the MFA Program), and Robert Root (author or editor of more than fourteen books) give readings of their work on Tuesday, August 3 at 7 p.m. in Ronk Lecture Hall, Schar College of Education. This event is free and open to the public.

Angie Estes

Angie Estes, poetry, is the author of four books, most recently Tryst (2009) and Chez Nous (2005), both from Oberlin College Press. Tryst was a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and was reviewed in The New York Times. Her second book, Voice-Over (Oberlin College Press, 2002), won the 2001 FIELD Poetry Prize and was also awarded the 2001 Alice Fay di Castagnola Prize from the Poetry Society of America. Her first book, The Uses of Passion (1995), was the winner of the Peregrine Smith Poetry Prize. The recipient of many awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, Pushcart Prize and the Cecil Hemley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, she has received fellowships, grants, and residencies from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the California Arts Council, the MacDowell Colony, and the Ohio Arts Council. Estes received her Ph.D. and M.A. in English from the University of Oregon and was for several years Professor of American Literature and Creative Writing at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. Most recently she has taught creative writing at Oberlin College and at The Ohio State University. She is also a contributing editor for the literary magazine The Journal.

Stephen Haven, Director

Stephen Haven, Director, has published two books of poems, Dust and Bread (Turning Point, 2008) and The Long Silence of the Mohawk Carpet Smokestacks (West End Press, 2004), and one memoir, The River Lock: One Boy’s Life along the Mohawk (Syracuse University Press, 2008). For Dust and Bread, he was named 2009 Co-Ohio Poet of the Year by the Ohio Poetry Day Association. Haven has also published a chapbook of collaborative translations from contemporary Chinese poetry, The Enemy in Defensive Positions (Poetry Miscellany Chapbooks, 2008). He is editor of The Poetry of W.D. Snodgrass: Everything Human (University of Michigan Press, 1993) and co-editor of two anthologies of contemporary poetry.
Haven's poetry and essays have appeared in The Southern Review, Parnassus, Literary Imagination, Crazyhorse, American Poetry Review, Salmagundi, Image, Western Humanities Review, The Missouri Review, and in many other journals. He has an M.F.A. in Poetry from the University of Iowa and a Ph.D. in American Civilization from New York University, where he wrote his dissertation under the direction of Harold Bloom. Haven has been a repeat fellow at Yaddo and MacDowell, twice a Fulbright Lecturer in American Literature (poetry) at universities in Beijing, and has won four individual artist grants and one residency fellowship (at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center) from the Ohio Arts Council.

Robert Root

Robert Root, creative nonfiction, is the author of Recovering Ruth: A Biographer’s Tale (University of Nebraska Press, 2002) and Following Isabella: Travels in Colorado Then and Now (University of Oklahoma Press, 2009) as well as The Nonfictionist’s Guide: On Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007) and E. B. White: The Emergence of an Essayist (University of Iowa Press, 1998). He is the editor of Landscapes With Figures: The Nonfiction of Place (Nebraska, 2007), a book of essays of place and commentaries by authors, and co-editor of the anthology The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers of/on Creative Nonfiction (Longman), now in its fifth edition. He is also the author or editor of nine other books and is the Interview/Roundtable editor for the journal Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction.

For more information about the MFA program and the summer residency reading series, visit http://www.ashland.edu/graduate/mfa