South Dakota Review

The University of South Dakota is launching a visiting writers’ reading series. Our inaugural events will take place over the next two days (September 22 and September 23, 2011), with a reading and a workshop featuring four writers: David Marshall Chan (USD’s Visiting Creative Writer), Courtney Huse-Wika (a USD Ph.D. creative writing alum and Assistant Professor at Black Hills State University), Pen Pearson (another USD Ph.D. creative writing alum and a Professor at Northern State University), and Miles Waggener (Associate Professor at University of Nebraska-Omaha).

Thursday, September 22, 2011, 7:00 p.m. — Freedom Forum, Neuharth Media Center
Poetry and Prose readings by authors David Marshall Chan, Courtney Huse Wika, Pen Pearson, and Miles Waggener
Free and open to the public.

Friday, September 23, 2011, 12:00 noon — Muenster University Center 216
Graduate student lunch with visiting writers.
A lunch open to University of South Dakota graduate students.

Friday, September 23, 2011, 3:00 p.m. — Muenster University Center 216
Tenure Tracking: A Workshop on the Creative Writing Job Market and Tenure-Track Process
Our (published! and employed!) visiting writers David Marshall Chan, Courtney Huse Wika, Pen Pearson, and Miles Waggener will provide brief personal career narratives, after which the floor will be opened to audience members to ask questions and solicit advice about their professional lives as writers post M.F.A. and/or Ph.D.
Free and open to the public.

David Marshall Chan is the author of Goblin Fruit: Stories, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. His writing has also appeared in such publications as Conjunctions, BOMB Magazine, and Columbia, and he has been awarded writing fellowships from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and the Norman Mailer Writers Colony. Writing in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Rick Moody called Goblin Fruit: Stories “probably the most stunning debut of the year, one that gives much promise of great things to come,” and in the New York Review of Books, Joyce Carol Oates wrote: “David Marshall Chan’s voice is haunting and original. Goblin Fruit is a fascinating cri de couer by a young writer of promise and substance.” He grew up in Southern California and previously lived in New York City, and is currently the Visiting Creative Writer at The University of South Dakota.

Courtney Huse Wika received her Ph.D. and M.A. in English with a specialization in creative writing from the University of South Dakota, and her B.A. in English and Philosophy from Augustana College in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. She has published both creatively and critically, most notably in Backwards City Review, 605 Magazine, Paddlefish, Epicenter, The MacGuffin, Life on the Farm and Ranch: South Dakota Stories, Voice of Youth Advocates, and a book chapter in the critical anthology Illuminating Torchwood: Essays on Narrative, Character and Sexuality in the BBC Series, co-authored with Dr. Susan Wolfe. Currently she is Director of the Writing Center and Assistant Professor of English at Black Hills State University in Spearfish, South Dakota.

Pen Pearson is a Professor of English at Northern State University in Aberdeen, South Dakota where she teaches creative writing, American literature, and composition. She recently published her first book of poems, Poetry as Liturgy: Presenting Poems in a Sacramental Sequence. Her current project is a biographical novel of British modernist poet Charlotte Mew.

Miles Waggener is the author of Phoenix Suites, (The Word Works, 03) winner the Washington Prize; and Portents Aside, (Two Dogs Press, 08). His second full-length collection, Sky Harbor, is forthcoming from Pinyon Publishing. His poems have appeared recently in Third Coast; The Pinch; Gulf Coast; New Poets of the American West, Helen Burns Poetry Anthology: New Voices from the Academy of American Poets’ University and College Prizes, 1999-2008; Verse Daily, and elsewhere. He is an Associate Professor in the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and lives in Omaha with the writer Megan Gannon and their son Manny.