Writing +C/Siting Houston: An Evening of Literary Placemaking

featuring

• Phillip Lopate, film critic, essayist, fiction writer and poet
• Miah Arnold, novelist, editor and teacher
• William Monroe, author and dean of the Honors College at the University of Houston

Wednesday, February 6 at 7 pm

The Honors College Commons (212 MD Anderson Library)

WRITING + C/SITING: HOUSTON is a collaborative project which brings together a wide range of writers to share the special places that make the Bayou City unique. Beginning in the summer 2011, Writing & C/Siting Houston asked a number of writers to craft a written portrait of a distinctive urban setting of personal significance to them. The contributors explored particular neighborhoods, parks, street corners, restaurants, and other community-based locales to get at the ways and the wheres through which Houston is known to and cherished by its residents.

Featured readers include:

• Phillip Lopate has written three personal essay collections - Bachelorhood (Little, Brown, 1981), Against Joie de Vivre (Poseidon-Simon & Schuster, 1989) and Portrait of My Body (Doubleday-Anchor, 1996); two novels, Confessions of Summer (Doubleday, 1979) and The Rug Merchant (Viking, 1987); a pair of novellas; three poetry collections, The Eyes Don't Always Want to Stay Open (Sun Press, 1972), The Daily Round (Sun Press, 1976) and At the End of the Day (Marsh Hawk Press, 2010); and a memoir of histeaching experiences, Being With Children (Doubleday, 1975).
• Miah Arnold is the author of Sweet Land of Bigamy, and a number of short pieces of literature. Her essay "You Owe Me" will appear in Best American Essays 2012. She earned a Ph.D. in writing and literature at the University of Houston. She teaches adults and children throughout Houston in University and nonprofit settings. She has served as a fiction editor at Gulf Coast and a poetry editor at Lyric Poetry Review. Her work has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Nanofiction, Confrontation, Painted Bride Quarterly, and the South Dakota Review. She lives in Houston, Texas, with her husband and two children.
• William Monroe is professor of English and Dean of the Honors College at the University of Houston. His book Power to Hurt: The Virtues of Alienation was selected as an outstanding academic book of the year by Choice magazine and nominated for the Phi Beta Kappa/Christian Gauss Award. His other publications include the play Primary Care, which deals with personhood issues related to Alzheimer's Disease, and articles on T.S. Eliot, Vladimir Nabokov, and Willa Cather. He is currently at work on The Vocation of Affliction: Flannery O'Connor and American Mastery.

Writing & C/Siting Houston is a collaboration among Houston Arts Alliance Folklife + Traditional Arts Program, the Cultural Enrichment Center at the University of Houston-Downtown, and Houston Folklore Archive of the University of Houston and has been funded in part with support from the Texas Commission on the Arts, Humanities Texas, National Endowment for the Arts, and Houston Endowment Inc.