Piper Writers House

ASU Book Group Meeting

Superstition Review

When: Thursday, February 29th 2024 from 12:00-1:00pm

Where: Piper Writers House (PWH) 450 E. Tyler Mall, ASU Tempe Campus OR Online

What: The ASU Book Group’s February 2024 reading selection is To Name the Bigger Lie: A Memoir in Two Stories by Sarah Viren. The book group is open to all in the ASU community and meets monthly from noon–1 p.m. with two different options for attendance: either in-person at the Piper Writers House or virtually on Zoom (registration required for online attendance). In-person attendees are invited to join the author for lunch after at the University Club, no-host.

Haven’t read the book? Come anyway! Authors are always present.

Synopsis of the Book: Past and present collide in this propulsive, one-of-a-kind meditation on truth and conspiracy, based on Viren’s viral essay of the same name. “This all started after the [2016] election,” Viren begins, “when the main narrative I kept hearing was that only uneducated whites believed the lies that were being told.” At first, she set out to write a book about her charismatic high school philosophy teacher, whose instruction sometimes bordered on conspiracy theory, interviewing teachers and classmates from her past to pick at the ways reasonable people can be manipulated to believe far-flung fictions. Then Viren’s wife received an email accusing her of sexual misconduct at the university where both worked, and Viren tapped into her background as an investigative journalist to untangle the accusations and clear her wife’s name.

Sarah Viren is an assistant professor in the Department of English’s creative writing program.

About the book group:

Remaining ASU Book Group meetings and selections for 2023–24 are:

The ASU Book Group is sponsored as a community outreach initiative by the Department of English and organized in partnership with the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing.

For more information about the book group contact Judith Smith at jps@asu.edu and follow the link provided for all the details and to register for the meeting: https://asuevents.asu.edu/event/asu-book-group-name-bigger-lie-sarah-viren

#ArtLitPhx: ASU Book Group: When My Brother Was an Aztec by Natalie Diaz

Superstition Review

Time: Wednesday, Apr. 24, 2019

Date: 12-1 p.m.

Location: Piper Writers House (PWH), 450 E Tyler Mall, Tempe, AZ 85281

Cost: Free

Event Details:

The ASU Book Group’s April 2019 reading selection is When My Brother Was an Aztec by Natalie Diaz. The book group is open to all in the ASU community and meets monthly from noon–1 p.m. in the Piper Writers House on ASU’s Tempe campus. Authors are always present. A no-cost luncheon follows at the University Club. Attendees at each meeting will be entered into a drawing for a $50 gift certificate! Drawing to be held in April.

Synopsis:
“I write hungry sentences,” Natalie Diaz once explained in an interview, “because they want more and more lyricism and imagery to satisfy them.” This debut collection of poetry is a fast-paced tour of Mojave life and family narrative: A sister fights for or against a brother on meth, and everyone from Antigone, Houdini, Huitzilopochtli, and Jesus is invoked and invited to hash it out. These darkly humorous poems illuminate far corners of the heart, revealing teeth, tails, and more than a few dreams.

The book is available from amazon.com 

Natalie Diaz is associate professor of English in creative writing at ASU.

The ASU Book Group is sponsored as a community outreach initiative by the Department of English and organized in partnership with the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing.

Download flyer: asu-book-group-18-19-flyer.pdf

Contact: Judith Smith

Email: jps@asu.edu

#ArtLitPhx: Seven Ways to Disrupt Your Poetry with Terese Svoboda

Superstition Review

Date: Saturday, April 20, 2019

Time: 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.

Location: Piper Writers House, 450 E Tyler Mall, Tempe, AZ 85281

Cost: $99 Regular, $79 Student

Event Details:

About the Class

Re-lineate, incorporate, untranslate, narrate, collaborate, investigate and capsize your ailing poem. Participants will look at the work of Brenda Hillman, Sean Singer, Latasha Nevada Diggs, Tusiata Avia, Maureen Seaton/Neil de la Floor/Kristine Snodgrass, Jayy Dodd to illustrate charged ways to reinvigorate stale or unformed material. Please bring a poem that needs resurrection and be prepared to celebrate at its innate genius – and play.

Meet Your Instructor

A Guggenheim fellow, Terese Svoboda is the author most recently of Professor Harriman’s Steam Air-Ship (poetry, 2016) and Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet(biography, 2018), and Great American Desert (stories, 2019). She’s won the Bobst Prize in fiction, the Iowa Prize for poetry, an NEH grant for translation, the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, the O. Henry award for the short story, the Bobst prize for the novel, and a Pushcart Prize for the essay. Her opera WET premiered at L.A.’s Disney Hall. She’s taught at Williams, Columbia School of the Arts, William and Mary, Bennington, Sarah Lawrence, New School, Davidson, the Universities of Tampa, Miami and Hawaii, as well as in Tbilisi, Nairobi and St. Petersburg for the Summer Literary Seminars.

For more information or to register for the event, please visit the Piper website.

#ArtLitPhx: ASU Book Group: ‘Counting Coup’ by Kelli Donley

Superstition Review

artlitphx

Date: Wednesday, March 27, 2019
Time: 12:00pm – 1:00pm
Location: Piper Writer’s House, 450 E. Tyler Mall, Tempe, AZ 85281
Cost: Free

Event Details:
The ASU Book Group’s March 2019 reading selection is “Counting Coup” by Kelli Donley. The book group is open to all in the ASU community and meets monthly from noon to 1 p.m. in the Piper Writers House on ASU’s Tempe campus. Authors are always present. A no-host luncheon follows at the University Club. Attendees at each meeting will be entered into a drawing for a $50 gift certificate! Drawing to be held in April.

Synopsis: Happily consumed with her academic career, Professor Avery Wainwright never planned on becoming sole guardian of her octogenarian Aunt Birdie. Forced to move Birdie — and her failing memory — into her tiny apartment, Avery’s precariously balanced life loses its footing. Unearthed in the chaos is a stack of sixty-year-old letters. Written in 1951, the letters tell of a year Avery’s grandmother, Alma Jean, spent teaching in the Indian school system, in the high desert town of Winslow, Arizona. The letters are addressed to Birdie, who was teaching at the Phoenix Indian School. The ghostly yet familiar voices in the letters tell of a dark time in her grandmother’s life, a time no one has ever spoken of. Torn between caring for the old woman who cannot remember and her very different memories of a grandmother no longer alive to explain, Avery searches for answers. But the scandal and loss she finds, the revelations about abuses, atrocities and cover-ups at the Indian schools, threaten far more than she’s bargained for.

The book is available from amazon.com.

Kelli Donley is a native Arizonan who works in public health. “Counting Coup” was inspired by Donley’s colleagues’ stories about childhoods spent at the Phoenix Indian School. One of the characters is an ASU professor.

The remaining ASU Book Group meeting and selection for 2018—19 is:

The ASU Book Group is sponsored as a community outreach initiative by the Department of English and organized in partnership with the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing.

 

#ArtLitPhx: Southwest Editor’s Forum

Superstition Review

Hayden’s Ferry Review is hosting their first “Southwest Editor’s Forum” on Saturday, February 10, located at the Piper Writer’s House at ASU’s Tempe campus.

Their announcement states: “We will explore process, share resources, network, and even feed you. It’s so easy as editors to sit in our offices and lose sight of our community. We focus on writers and discuss their efforts, but as editors, we have different needs and unique challenges to surmount. At this inaugural event, we would like to convene the editors of our region for an afternoon of discussion, camaraderie, and sharing. We hope you will join us and register for this free event right away.”

Presenters include Matt Bell, a founding editor at The Collagist; Rosemarie Dombrowski the inaugural Poet Laureate of Phoenix; as well as Sally Ball, the associate director at Four Way Books.

Reserve your free seat here.

#ArtLitPhx: Literatura, artes e industria editorial en Phoenix

Superstition Review

Literatura, artes e industria editorial en PhoenixCardboard House Press, CALA Alliance, and ASU’s School of International Letters and Cultures are hosting Casandra Hernandez and Giancarlo Huapaya in their lecture series. The pair will discuss literature, arts, and publishing in Phoenix during this bilingual event. The event will take place Thursday, October 19, from 1:30pm to 2:40pm at the Piper Writers House on the ASU Tempe Campus (450 E. Tyler Mall, Tempe, AZ 85281).

Casandra Hernandez is the Executive Director of the CALA Alliance, and Giancarlo Huapaya is the editor of Cardboard House Press. For more information, check out the event’s Facebook page.

#ArtLitPhx: Amelia Gray at the Piper Writers House

Superstition Review

Amelia Gray

The Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing is proud to present Amelia Gray at the Piper Writers House. The event, which will include a light reception, a reading, an informal Q&A, and a signing, will take place on Friday, October 13 from 7pm to 9pm at the Piper Writers House (450 E Tyler Mall, Tempe, AZ 85281). The event is open to the public and free.

Amelia Gray is the author of five books: Isadora, Gutshot, THREATS, Museum of the Weird, and AM/PM. She is the winner of the NYPL Young Lion, of FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize, and a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.

You can find more information about the event and an RSVP at the Virginia G. Piper Center website, but here are a few more details:

Using the scaffolding of Isadora Duncan’s life and the stuff of her spirit, Amelia Gray’s breakout novel delivers an incredibly imaginative portrait of the artist, resulting in “a stunning meditation on art and grief by one of America’s most exciting young authors” (NPR). In 1913, Isadora Duncan was known as much for her stunning dance performances as for her eccentric and salacious personal life—her lovers included poets, directors, and the heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune. But when her two children drowned in Paris, she found herself taking on a role she had never dreamed of. As dynamic, enthralling, and powerful as the visionary artist it captures, Amelia Gray’s Isadora is a relentless and living portrayal of a woman who shattered convention, even in the darkest days of her life.

You can also find more information on the event’s Facebook page.

ASU Book Group: ‘Crossing the Line: A Marriage across Borders’ by Linda Valdez

Superstition Review

Crossing the Line book coverThe ASU Book Group is meeting Wednesday, Sep. 28, 2016 from 12-1 p.m. at the Piper Writers House (PWH) ASU, Tempe campus. The September 2016 reading selection of the ASU Book Group is “Crossing the Line: A Marriage across Borders” by local writer Linda Valdez. The book group is open to all in the ASU community and meets monthly from noon–1 p.m. in the Piper Writers House on ASU’s Tempe campus. Authors are generally present.

Not a typical immigration story, “Crossing the Line” is told by a middle-class American woman who falls in love with the son of an impoverished family from rural Mexico—a man who crosses the border illegally to be with her. Married in 1988, Linda and Sixto Valdez learn to love each other’s very different families and cultures, raising their child to walk proudly in both worlds. “Crossing the Line” cuts through the fears and preconceptions that fuel the continuing political turmoil over immigration. The book is available at amazon.com.

A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 2003, Linda Valdez is a columnist and editorial writer at the Arizona Republic/azcentral.com. She has written extensively about immigration and border issues. Her commentary opposing Arizona’s infamous anti-immigration laws earned her the Scripps Howard Walker Stone Award for editorial writing in 2011.

Other ASU Book Group meetings and selections for 2016-2017 include Oct. 26 (Matt Bell: “Scrapper”); Nov. 30 (Betty E. Hammer Joy: “Angela Hutchinson Hammer: Arizona’s Pioneer Newspaperwoman”); Jan. 25 (Michael Smith: “At Home with the Aztecs: An Archaeologist Uncovers Their Daily Life”); Feb. 22 (Tara Ison: “Ball”); Mar. 29 (Martin Beck Matuštík: “Out of Silence: Repair across Generations”); andApr. 26 (Melissa Pritchard: “A Solemn Pleasure: To Imagine, Witness, and Write”). Additional selections TBD.

The ASU Book Group is sponsored as a community outreach initiative by the Department of English and organized in partnership with the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing.

Free of charge and open to the public.

ASU Book Group: ‘Pachacuti: World Overturned’ by Lori Eshleman

Superstition Review

Lori Eshleman Wednesday, February 24th from 12pm-1pm, ASU instructor Lori Eshleman (College of Letters and Sciences) will be giving a book discussion on her novel Pachacuti: World Overturned (Bagwyn Books). This discussion is open to all in the ASU community and will be held in the Piper Writers House on ASU’s Tempe campus. 

Lori Eshleman, who has taught at ASU since 1994, has always been drawn to those spaces in time where cultural and religious traditions have encountered each other, from the European Middle Ages to colonial Latin America to the American West. Her new book of historical fiction explores the overlap of complex issues of race, gender, politics and religion through characters whose lives become entwined during an uprising in the Andean kingdom of Quito in the 1700s.

For more information on the event, click here.

Franz Wright Reading

Superstition Review

It’s finally here! Tomorrow, Superstition Review and the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing are hosting a reading with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Franz Wright!

Franz Wright, born in Austria and educated at Oberlin College, received the Pulitzer Prize in 2004 for his book of poetry Walking to Martha’s Vineyard. Critics have praised Wright for his poetry, exclaiming that “Wright oscillates between direct and evasive dictions, between the barroom floor and the arts club podium, from aphoristic aside to icily poetic abstraction.” The Boston Review has said of Wright’s poetry; “among the most honest, haunting, and human being written today.” Other works by Wright include Wheeling Motel, God’s Silence, The Beforelife, Going North in Winter, and many others.

The reading and book signing will be held on Tuesday, April 20th at the Pima Auditorium (Room 230) in the Memorial Union at 7:30 p.m.

The following day, April 21, a public craft Q&A will be held at 11:00 a.m. at the Piper Writers House on the ASU Tempe campus.