08/30/2024
The 2024-2025 WELLSPRING LITERARY SERIES lineup is complete!
{All readings take place at the ArtReach Center in downtown Mt. Pleasant, on Monday evenings beginning at 7pm, and will feature a CMU student poet, an MPHS student poet, as well as musical performances and complimentary food. You don't want to miss these special events! Mark your calendars NOW!}
September 23: Keith Taylor
An alumnus of CMU’s MA in English program, Keith Taylor is originally from Western Canada, but has lived for the past 50 years in Michigan. He has authored or edited 20 books and chapbooks. Before the very recently published All the Time You Want: Selected Poems 1977 – 2017, and the brand new collection What Can the Matter Be?, his last full length collection, The Bird-while won the Bronze medal for the Foreword/Indies Poetry Book of the Year. His poems, stories, reviews, essays and translations have appeared widely in North America and in Europe. Six years ago he retired from the University of Michigan, where he taught Creative Writing for 20 years. Before that he worked as a bookseller in Ann Arbor for another 20 years. Taylor has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and from the Michigan Council for the Arts and Cultural Affairs. He has been Writer/Artist In Residence at Isle Royale National Park (twice), the Detroit YMCA, The International Writers’ and Translators’ Centre of Rhodes, Greece, the University of Michigan Biological Station, and Greenhills School.
October 21: Andrew Collard
Set in the metropolis centered on Detroit, MI, Andrew Collard’s first book, Sprawl, won the Hollis Summers poetry prize and was published in March of 2023 by Ohio University Press. Poems from Sprawl have appeared in Ploughshares, AGNI, Best New Poets, and many more journals and magazines. Andrew received a Ph.D. from Western Michigan University and currently teaches as a Visiting Professor at Grand Valley State University. He lives with his son in Grand Rapids, MI.
March 3: LINDA NEMEC FOSTER
Linda Nemec Foster has published 14 collections of poetry including Amber Necklace from Gdansk, Talking Diamonds, The Blue Divide, Bone Country, and The Lake Michigan Mermaid (with Anne-Marie Oomen and Meridith Ridl, 2019 Michigan Notable Book). Her work appears in numerous magazines and journals such as The Georgia Review, Ni**od, New American Writing, North American Review, Indiana Review, Quarterly West, Verse Daily, and others. Two of her recent books, Bone Country and The Blue Divide, were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. The inaugural Poet Laureate of Grand Rapids, Michigan (2003-05), Foster is the founder of the Contemporary Writers Series at Aquinas College.
April 7: ALISE ALOUSI
Alise Alousi’s poetry collection, What to Count, was published in August 2023 by Wayne State University Press. Her writing has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including Three Fold Press, Mom Egg Review, The Detroit Free Press, Inclined to Speak: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Poetry and We Call to the Eye and the Night: Love Poems by Writers of Arab Descent. She is a 2019 Kresge Literary Arts Fellow and has received awards and fellowships from the Knight Foundation, Mesa Refuge, Martha's Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and others. She has worked at InsideOut Literary Arts in Detroit for two decades and currently teaches poetry through the Arab American National Museum's Teen Writing Fellows program.
