Extra Credit Opportunity: Distinguished Visiting Writers

Pittsburg State University’s Distinguished Visiting Writers Series presents the 7th Annual Faculty Reading, featuring fiction writers Lizanne Minerva and Lori Baker Martin. The reading takes place at 7:00 PM, Thursday, February 2 in the Governor’s Room of the Overman Student Center. A reception follows in the Heritage Room. The reading is free and open to the public.
Lizanne Minerva has published short stories in literary journals such as Puerto del Sol, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, and Apalachee Quarterly. Originally from Tallahassee, Florida, Minerva was the recipient of the Ernest Hemingway Fellowship in fiction at Indiana University, where she earned an MFA in Creative Writing in 1992. She later completed a Ph.D. in Creative Writing at Florida State University. Minerva has taught fiction and literature at Missouri State University and is currently an instructor at PSU. Fiction writer Roland Sodowsky says Minerva “creates characters both believable and surprising in their complexity. Her fiction is a pleasure to read.” Novelist Kathy De Grave says Minerva’s stories present “an incisive depiction of women’s lives in middle-class America. Lizanne’s characters are spunky and humorous. We laugh with them as they reveal their flaws. We recognize these women and sympathize with the hard choices they have to make every day!” Minerva is working on a collection of short stories about mothers and children, and on Thursday she will be reading some of her recent fiction.
Lori Baker Martin earned a Master’s degree in English from PSU in 2009, then completed her MFA at The Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa, where she was named a Truman Capote Fellow. She was also the recipient of The Writer’s Workshop Clark Fischer Ansley Award for Excellence in Fiction. She has also received awards from Kansas Voices and the Cincinnati Review Schiff Prose Contest. Her work has been published in Prick of the Spindle and The MacGuffin, and is forthcoming in The Little Balkans Review. Novelist Kathy De Grave says that Martins’s writing “has a haunting quality.  Scene by scene the images are vivid and original; they stay in one’s mind. The characters, too, are so fully drawn they seem real, even though the story they inhabit often verges on the mysterious. Lori finds beauty in the grotesque and sees the struggle of the human spirit in everyday choices.”  Hailing from rural southeast Kansas, Martin is a third-generation Pitt State graduate, and on Thursday she will be reading from Bitter Water, her novel-in-progress set in Civil War-era Edna, Kansas and Carthage, Missouri.
For more information, contact the English Department at x4689.