VOICES IN THE NORTH COUNTRY

Voices in the North Country

Writers Symposium

Thursday, Sept. 26, 2019

1:30-4 p.m., 7-8 p.m.

UMPI Campus Center

Designed for writers, literature lovers, and general enthusiasts, the University of Maine at Presque Isle's writers symposium, Voices in the North Country, is making its return after nearly two decades. The symposium will focus on the theme Writing What You Know, with readings by local students and published writers and a panel discussion and Q&A with Maine writers. The event concludes with a Distinguished Lecture at 7 p.m. by Dr. Ted Van Alst. An UMPI alumnus, Van Alst is the Associate Professor and Director of Indigenous Nations Studies at Portland State University in Oregon and author of the story collection Sacred Smokes. If you're looking to hone your writing craft, meet fellow writers, or just enjoy good writing, be sure to make plans to attend this symposium!

For more information about this event, which is free and open to the public, please contact UMPI's Marketing and Communications Office at 207-768-9452 or email umpi@maine.edu.

Schedule of Events

Afternoon

1:30 p.m. Welcoming Remarks: Deborah Hodgkins, UMPI Professor of English. Melissa Lizotte, UMPI English Alum, Planning Committee Chair.

2:45-3:45 p.m. Panel Discussion, “Writing What You Know:” Alice Bolstridge, Anthony Scott, Jenny Radsma, Ted Van Alst, Kathryn Olmstead—Moderator

Evening

7-8 p.m. Distinguished Lecture, Dr. Theodore C. Van Alst, Jr.

1:35-2:30 p.m. Readings: Alice Bolstridge, Pat Karpen, Anthony Scott, Manish Pandey, Jenny Radsma, Ted Van Alst

2:30-2:45 p.m. Break, Book sales

Symposium Presenter Biographies

Alice Bolstridge is an UMPI alum and retired English teacher. Born and raised in Portage, she has published more than one hundred poems, stories, and essays in magazines and anthologies. She won the 2013 Kenneth Patchen award for Experimental Fiction for her book Oppression for the Heaven of It published by JEF Books. Her chapbook of poems, “Chance & Choice,” was published in 2015 by Finishing Line Press.

Pat Karpen graduated from Catholic University in Washington, D.C. a long time ago. She is grateful to UMPI and her professors for showing her how to take decades of jottings on scraps of paper, cocktail napkins, and the margins of newspapers and begin to try and write.

Anthony Scott teaches literature, creative writing and composition at the Maine School of Science and Mathematics, and he taught at the University of Maine at Presque Isle for a number of years. He has an MFA from Wilkes University. In addition to his chapbook, The Year Things Came Apart, his work has been published in Echoes Magazine, Upcountry Literary Journal, the Star Herald, MSSM Literary Magazine, and The Write Life. He finds the rivers and rocks, the dark spruce and white snow, all ideal settings for creating and plans to spend the rest of his life writing and teaching in northern Maine.

Manish Pandey is a sophomore at UMPI majoring in business administration. He is from Nepal and has only recently started writing fiction. His chosen story for the Voices symposium, “Threshold,” was written for his creative  writing course and revised for UMPI’s student literary journal Upcountry.

Jenny Radsma is a native of Alberta, Canada, who teaches nursing at the University of Maine at Fort Kent and writes on weekends. She is one of five women who met at a writer’s workshop and decided to continue meeting as a group dedicated to chronicling the lives of their mothers. The result was the anthology Compassionate Journey: Honoring Our Mothers’ Stories, published in 2018 by Maine Authors Publishing. Her work has appeared in The Sun, Echoes, and Goose River Anthology.

Dr. Theodore C. Van Alst, Jr. is Associate Professor and Director of Indigenous Nations Studies at Portland State University. He is coeditor and Creative Editor for Transmotion (an open-access journal of postmodern indigenous studies). His novel in stories about growing up in Chicago, Sacred Smokes, was published in 2018 by the University of New Mexico Press, which also published his edited volume The Faster Redder Road: The Best UnAmerican Stories of Stephen Graham Jones. His academic work appears in collections such as Seeing Red, Visualities, and The Routledge Companion to Native American Literature. His fiction, essays, and photography have been published widely.