Creative Writing Reading Series: Writers Harvest
The Creative Writing Reading series presents Writers Harvest featuring John Calderazzo, Mary Crow, Deanna Ludwin, Steven Schwartz, and Bill Tremblay
Each year, the Creative Writing program participates in a nationwide program to fight hunger. Across the country, writers and readers unite to support food banks, soup kitchens, and local nutrition programs. This year, we’re thrilled to welcome former faculty in honor of the MFA’s 40th anniversary.
John Calderazzo
John Calderazzo was a freelance magazine writer when he came to CSU in 1986, where he started the undergraduate creative nonfiction program and taught an expanded range of graduate CNF courses. Later, with Debby Thompson and Sarah Sloane, he founded the MFA nonfiction track. John’s three nonfiction books include Rising Fire: Volcanoes & Our Inner Lives, about volcanoes and human culture. He’s also the author of two poetry collections, The Exact Weight of the Soul and In the Soup. His work has appeared in Audubon, Georgia Review, High Country News, North American Review, Orion, Terrain.org, Witness, Writer’s Digest, and many other journals, as well as in anthologies such as Best American Nature Writing, Best Travel Adventure Stories, and Here: Poems for the Planet (Copper Canyon Press). He’s the winner of the Carolina Quarterly Young Fiction Writers’ Prize, a Colorado Arts Council grant, Best CSU Teacher, and many other teaching awards. With his wife and CSU colleague SueEllen Campbell, he initiated what may have been the country’s first campus-wide climate change discussion and speaker series. Since retiring in 2016, he has taught storytelling techniques to scientists who want to speak to the public and decision-makers.
Mary Crow
Former Poet Laureate of Colorado, Mary Crow has published three full-length collections of poems, three chapbooks, and five books of translation. Her most recent book of poems is Addicted to the Horizon. Her awards include poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Colorado Council on the Arts, as well as three Fulbright awards. Her residencies include MacDowell, Djerassi, and Hedgebrook in the U.S., and El Gouna, Valparaiso, and Cesky Krumlov abroad. She is currently circulating a new poetry manuscript, Toward What Country.
Deanna Ludwin
Deanna Kern Ludwin taught literature and creative writing at Colorado State University, where she also coordinated the English Department Internship Program and the Creative Writing Teaching Program. While at CSU, she received a College of Liberal Arts Excellence in Teaching Award, a University Best Teacher Award, and two Golden Apple Awards. Her poems and flash fiction have appeared in Cimarron Review, Copper Nickel, Flash, Gyroscope, I-70 Review, The Normal School, Second Coming, and other publications. She is currently working on a poetry collection and an investigative memoir, The Girl Who Died.
Steven Schwartz
Steven Schwartz is the author of the novels Therapy, A Good Doctor’s Son, and The Tenderest of Strings, as well as four collections of stories. A two-time recipient of the Colorado Book Award for Literary Fiction, he has received the Nelson Algren Award from the Chicago Tribune, the Cohen Award from Ploughshares, the Sherwood Anderson Prize, two O. Henry Prize Story Awards, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. He is Professor Emeritus of English at Colorado State University and fiction editor at large for Colorado Review.
Bill Tremblay
Bill Tremblay has published Magician’s Hat: Poems on the Life and Art of David Alfaro Siqueiros, Walks Along the Ditch, The Luminous Racetrack, and My Triggering Town since retiring from the faculty of Colorado State University’s MFA Program in Creative Writing in 2006. During his time in the English Department, he initiated several courses, including internships in teaching creative writing and literary editing. He has also kept himself busy writing a series of reviews of books by contemporary American poets for Rain Taxi. He is currently preparing his latest book for publication.
The CSU Creative Writing Reading Series is made possible by the Organization of Graduate Student Writers, the CSU Department of English, the College of Liberal Arts, CSU Libraries, Associated Students of Colorado State University, the Mary Crow and Deanna Ludwin Reading Series Endowment, the Lilla B. Morgan Memorial Endowment, the donor sponsor of the Crow-Tremblay Alumni Reading Series, and other generous support. Learn how to become a donor and support the series.