For the first time ever, Ohio State’s MFA program will be
holding a book fair and festival featuring talks, readings, and signings by former MFA students..(Details here). This three-day event will begin on September 14th and will include several graduates with forthcoming books, such as Christopher Coake (You Came Back), Michael Kardos (The Three-Day Affair), Joe Oestreich (Hitless Wonder: A Life in Minor League Rock and Roll), Catherine Pierce (The Girls of Peculiar), Letitia Trent (One Perfect Bird), Claire Vaye Watkins (Battleborn), and Betsy Wheeler (Loud Dreaming in a Quiet Room).

We’ll also welcome back OSU stars Donald Ray Pollock (Knockemstiff, The Devil All the Time), winner of the PEN/Robert Bingham Prize for a first work of fiction; Natalie Shapero, author of the upcoming No Object and current Kenyon Review fellow at Kenyon College; and Ida Stewart, author of Gloss and winner of the 2011 Perugia Press Prize for a first or second book of poetry by a woman.

The festival, in addition to talks and signings, will include panels of extremely high interest to aspiring writers and literary connoisseurs. These panels will touch on topics such as publishing a first book, finding and keeping a tenure-track university job, online publishing for poets, genre versus literary novels, and the transition from story collection to novel, as discussed by writers whose first published works were collections.

All in all, this is a great chance to enjoy, (and in my case, learn from), the writings and ideas of Ohio State’s publishing luminaries. We’re honored to have them home.