Visiting Writer Program Welcomes Mason Alums Liam Callanan and Cynthia Marie Hoffman

Visiting Writer Program Welcomes Mason Alums Liam Callanan and Cynthia Marie Hoffman

Novelist and short story writer Liam Callanan and poet Cynthia Marie Hoffman—both of them alumni of Mason’s MFA program in creative writing—will round out the Fall 2018 Visiting Writer series with a joint reading on Thursday, November 8. Their reading begins at 7:30 p.m. in the Fenwick Library Reading Room, second floor of Fenwick Library, on Mason’s Fairfax Campus.  The reading is free and open to the public, and books by each author will be for sale during the event.

Cynthia Marie Hoffman is the author of three full-length collections of poetry: Call Me When You Want to Talk About the Tombstones, Paper Doll Fetus, and Sightseer, as well as the chapbook Her Human Costume. Hoffman is the recipient of a Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, a Director’s Guest fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Wisconsin Arts Board. Her poems have appeared in The Believer, Pleiades, Fence, Blackbird, diode, The Journal, and elsewhere.

Liam Callanan is the winner of the 2017 George W. Hunt, SJ Prize in Arts, Letters & Journalism. He's the author of The Cloud Atlas,  All Saints, Listen, and most recently, Paris by the Book. He serves in the English department of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and was previously its chair, as well as coordinator of its Ph.D. program in creative writing. His short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in a variety of literary journals, including Gulf Coast, the New Haven Review, Tinge (where his story was named one of the Millions Writers Award Notable Stories of 2011 by storySouth), the Writers Chronicle, Blackbird, Crab Orchard Review, Southern Indiana  Review, Caketrain, failbetter and Phoebe. Liam is also the creator and co-executive producer of the Poetry Everywhere animated film series.

Stay tuned for information ahead on the Spring 2019 Visiting Writers series—to be announced here shortly!