 Shanley Jacobs, Aaron Plasek, Adam Peterson |
The Drake University Writers and Critics Series will host the Alumni Writers Festival at 7:30 p.m. Thursday Oct. 11, in the Cowles Library Reading Room.
The festival will feature three Drake alumni who will read from their recent fiction and poetry. Jennifer Perrine, assistant professor of English, will then moderate a discussion in which the writers will talk about how Drake prepared them for pursuing their current work in creative writing. In addition, the writers will answer questions and share tips on getting published and the ins and outs of graduate studies in creative writing.
The featured writers are:
- Shanley Jacobs, AS’05, studied English literature at both Drake and Oxford University. Currently, Shanley teaches writing, rhetoric and creative writing at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she pursues her MFA in poetry.
- Adam Peterson, AS’03, has been featured recently or has work forthcoming in Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, Cream City Review, Handsome and others. “The Single Father,” a story he co-wrote, won the 2006 Sherwood Anderson Fiction Award at The Mid-American Review.
- Aaron Plasek, AS’03, edited The Dimebag of Poetry and curated the Et cet*er*a reading series before earning an MFA in writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has taught at the Art Institute, St. Augustine College and Benedictine University. He is writing two novels and a collection of poems.
Drake’s English Department and Center for the Humanities sponsor the series, which is free and open to the public.