Joseph Bathanti, author of several award-winning books of poetry, fiction and creative non-fiction, and a recent recipient of the North Carolina Award in Literature, the state's highest civilian honor, will lead a discussion, "Working—and Playing—Across Genres," as The University of Baltimore's M.F.A. in Creative Writing & Publishing Arts kicks off its fall authors series. The talk will take place on Thursday, Sept. 17 at 7 p.m. in the Bogolmony Room, on the top floor of the UBalt Student Center, 21 W. Mt. Royal Ave. The event is free and open to the public.
"Joseph and I are friends from working together for many years at the Carlow University low-residency MFA program in Pittsburgh," says Marion Winik, professor in the MFA program. "He's a wonderful, thoughtful teacher as well an accomplished author in all genres. I've been hoping to get him to Baltimore for a visit for years."
A former Poet Laureate for North Carolina, Bathanti is a professor at Appalachian State University. The grandson of Italian and French immigrants, his father was a steelworker and his mother a seamstress. After growing up and pursuing his education in Pittsburgh, Bathanti went to North Carolina as a VISTA volunteer 1976, and has lived there ever since.
Critical acclaim is a consistent regarding Bathanti's works:
"Bathanti does what the best realists do: he brings beauty to the terror of the mundane, mystery to the overlooked desperation of people we might never meet in real life but will know intimately because we have met them in Bathanti's fiction," says novelist Wiley Cash.
"Bathanti's wonderful new book of poems is filled with stunning recall, as if from an obsessed insomniac bearing a camera, revealing an old Pittsburgh, filled with 'straphangers, cigarettes and slush,' ever conscious of class and racial divides and annihilations that have existed from the start," says the poet Judith Vollmer.
Various titles by Bathanti will be available from the Ivy Bookshop during the event.
Learn more about The University of Baltimore's MFA in Creative Writing and Publishing Arts.