Other series highlights are talks by an internationally recognized poetry-slam performer and an award-winning poet and essayist.
UofL’s English department brings in distinguished writers through the Anne and William Axton Reading Series of free literary events. The readings and master classes are open to the public. Here’s the fall reading series schedule, with events on Belknap Campus unless otherwise noted:
Sept. 27–28: Maureen Morehead, a UofL graduate with a doctorate in English, has published four books of poetry: “In a Yellow Room,” “Our Brothers’ War,” “A Sense of Time Left” and “A Melancholy Teacher.” The Kentucky Arts Council and the Kentucky Foundation for Women have awarded her fellowships, and she taught for several years for the Kentucky Institute for the Arts in Education, a program designed to help educators integrate the arts into their teaching.
She will read from her work at 7:30 p.m. Sept. 27 in Chao Auditorium, Ekstrom Library, and will lead a two-hour master class at 10 a.m. Sept. 28 in Room 300, Bingham Humanities Building.
Oct. 13: Anis Mojgani, Texas-based founding member of the touring Poetry Revival, is a two-time National Poetry Slam champion and an International World Cup Poetry Slam winner. He has performed for audiences from the United Nations to TEDx. Mojgani wrote the poetry collections “Over the Anvil We Stretch” and “The Feather Room.” The Axton series will sponsor his keynote reading for the Louisville Literary Arts’ Writer’s Block Festival.
Mojgani will speak at 6 p.m. at UofL’s Cressman Center for Visual Arts, First and Main streets. His talk is free but tickets are required; register for the festival from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Oct. 13 at The Green Building, 732 E. Market St., to receive tickets.
Nov. 8–9: Mary Reufle, who teaches at Vermont College of Fine Arts, has published 10 books of poetry, the prose work “The Most of It” and the comic book “Go Home and Go to Bed.” She also is an erasure artist whose treatments of 19th century texts have been exhibited in galleries and published. Her 2010 “Selected Poems” won the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award, and she also has received the Whiting Writer’s Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters literature award and Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships.
Reufle will read from her works at 7:30 p.m. Nov. 8 in Bingham Poetry Room, Ekstrom Library, and lead a two-hour master class at 10 a.m. Nov. 9 in Room 300, Bingham Humanities Building.