Spalding at 21c: Voice and Vision is again going virtual for the season finale of the popular summer series, 6:00-7:30 p.m. Eastern on Thursday, August 20. The reading, a partnership of Spalding University’s School of Creative and Professional Writing and 21c Museum Hotel Louisville, will take place online via Zoom. It’s a free and open virtual event to support our vibrant writing and arts community.

Sign up by August 19 to receive the Zoom link: Click here. 

The line-up showcases newly published and produced authors and a playwright from around the region. Readers include Drēma Drudge, Michelle Tyrene Johnson, Ellen Birkett Morris, and Rick Neumayer.  Sena Jeter Naslund and Amy Foos Kapoor emcee.

Alice Gray Stites, Chief Curator and Museum Director of 21c Museum Hotels, will highlight the exhibition installed in Proof on Main: Fallen Fruit: The Practices of Everyday Life.

Pictured: David Burns and Austin Young/Fallen Fruit. “Kentucky / A Dark and Bloody Ground,” 2016. Found frames, found taxidermy busts, original photography from Goshen, Kentucky, found photography from the Edward Curtis collection at The Library of Congress.

The annual reading series runs the third Thursday of every month May through August. Sena Jeter Naslund, the founding program director of Spalding University’s low-residency MFA in Writing program, and Katy Yocom, associate director of Spalding’s School of Creative and Professional Writing, direct the series.

About the Readers
Drēma Drudge suffers from Stendhal’s Syndrome, the condition in which one becomes overwhelmed in the presence of great art. She attended Spalding University’s MFA in Creative Writing Program where she learned to transform that intensity into fiction. Her debut novel is titled Victorine (Fleur-de-Lis Press, 2020). Michelle Tyrene Johnson is a playwright, journalist for 89.3 WFPL News Louisville, and an MFA candidate in Spalding’s School of Creative and Professional Writing. Her play “Rights of Passage” was produced in July by Four Walls Theater. Her play “Only One Day a Year” received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and several of her plays, including “Wiccans in the Hood” and “The Negro Whisperer,” have appeared in New York City festivals and readings. Ellen Birkett Morris is the author of Lost Girls (TouchPoint Press, 2020), a collection of short stories. Her fiction has appeared in Shenandoah, Antioch Review, Notre Dame Review, South Carolina Review, and Santa Fe Literary Review, among other journals. She is a winner of the Bevel Summers Prize for short fiction and a recipient of a 2013 Al Smith Fellowship. Rick Neumayer has published short fiction in many literary magazines, and three of his full-length Broadway-style musical collaborations have been produced. Journeyman (Fleur-de-Lis Press, 2020) is his first published novel. The Louisville native, resident, and Male High graduate is a retired teacher.

Series co-director and host Sena Jeter Naslund is the author of nine books, including the bestselling novels Adam & Eve, Abundance: A Novel of Marie Antoinette, Ahab’s Wife and Four Spirits. She was inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame earlier this year.

Series coordinator and co-host Amy Foos Kapoor is a producer, writer, managing editor of The Louisville Review, and graduate of Spalding’s MFA program. Her debut picture book, Into the Blue: A Counting Adventure (BeaLu Books) will be published in early 2021.

About Spalding’s School of Creative and Professional Writing
Spalding’s School of Creative and Professional Writing houses three graduate writing programs: the nationally distinguished, 65-credit MFA in Writing program; the 35-credit Master of Arts in Writing (MAW) with creative and professional tracks; and a 15-credit graduate certificate in writing, also with creative and professional tracks. All programs are offered on the low-residency model and are built on a commitment to excellence in a noncompetitive, supportive atmosphere. All three programs offer fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, writing for children and young adults, and writing for TV, screen, and stage, with professional writing available in the MAW and certificate. Semesters begin in the spring, summer, and fall with a residency in Louisville or abroad; then, faculty and students return home for an independent study focused on the student’s writing. Students may customize the residency location, season, and pace of their studies.