Author Talk with Erika Meitner and Matthew Vollmer
Venue: Blacksburg Library, Blacksburg
Organizations: Erika Meitner, Matthew Vollmer
Date: Thursday, October 11, 2018
Time: 6:30 - 8:00 PM
Event Types: Speaking Engagements
Cost: Free
Description:
Blacksburg Library presents an Author Talk with Erika Meitner and Matthew Vollmer on Thursday, October 11, 2018.

Join us as local authors and Virginia Tech Professors Erika Meitner and Matthew Vollmer read from their new works. Meitner's new book of narrative poetry Holy Moly Carry Me "takes readers into the heart of southern Appalachia," while Vollmer's new books of speculative essays, Permanent Exhibit "reclaims the art of letting one's mind wander and explore in the age of the status update".

Erika Meitner is a poet and the author of six books of poems. She also directs the Creative Writing programs at Virginia Tech.

She was born and raised in Queens and Long Island, New York. She attended Dartmouth College (for a BA in Creative Writing and Literature), Hebrew University on a Reynolds Scholarship, and the University of Virginia, where she received her MFA in Creative Writing as a Henry Hoyns Fellow, and her MA in Religious Studies as a Morgenstern Fellow in Jewish Studies.

Her poems have appeared in Tin House, The New York Times Magazine, Best American Poetry, Virginia Quarterly Review, The New Republic, Ploughshares and elsewhere.

Links:

• http://erikameitner.com/
• https://www.facebook.com/ErikaMeitner
• https://www.twitter.com/rikam99

Matthew Vollmer is the author of two collections of short fiction, "Gateway to Paradise" and "Future Missionaries of America", as well as inscriptions for headstones, a collection of essays. With David Shields, he is the co-editor of "Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo Interviews", "Faux-Lectures", "Quasi-Letters", “Found” Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts, which collects a number of stories that masquerade as other forms of writing. Vollmer is also the editor of "A Book of Uncommon Prayer", a volume of everyday invocations from over 60 writers, each of whom were charged with writing–regardless of their religious inclinations–a prayer. His fourth book, "Permanent Exhibit", a collection of short prose originally published as status updates on a popular social media platform, will be published in the Fall of 2018.

His work has appeared widely in magazines, including: Paris Review, Glimmer Train, The Sun, Virginia Quarterly Review, Epoch, Tin House, The Oxford American, Colorado Review, Gulf Coast, Ecotone, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Antioch Review, Willow Springs and New Letters. Vollmer is the recipient of a 2010 National Endowment for the Arts grant, as well as the Sturm Award for Creative Arts at Virginia Tech. His work has been short-listed three times for the Best American Short Stories series, and appears in Best American Essays 2013. For a brief time, he served as editor for the 21st Century Prose Series for the University of Michigan Press.

Vollmer holds a B.A. in English from the University of North Carolina, an M.A. in English from North Carolina State University, and an M.F.A. in fiction writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. An Associate Professor of English, he is a faculty member of the MFA in Creative Writing program at Virginia Tech. He lives in Blacksburg with his wife and son.

Links:

• http://matthewvollmer.com/
• https://www.twitter.com/matthewvollmer

Books will be available for sale and signing.

For more information, visit: http://www.montgomery-floyd.lib.va.us/ or https://www.facebook.com/pages/Blacksburg-Library/152248358735 or call 540-552-8246.