A new lineup of visiting poets to our area is slated for the fall 2016 installment of the Third Thursday Poetry Series. Once again, faculty designers from Auburn’s College of Architecture, Design, and Construction created eight broadsides representing works by each of the poets participating in the series. A limited number of prints and sets will be available for sale in the Museum Shop.

This program has been made possible by grants from the Alabama State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.

August 18

Rose McLarney has published two collections of poems, “Its Day Being Gone” (Penguin Books, 2014) and “The Always Broken Plates of Mountains” (Four Way Books, 2012). “Its Day Being Gone” is the 2013 National Poetry Series winner. Rose has been awarded fellowships by the MacDowell Colony, Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences, and Warren Wilson College, and won the Fellowship of Southern Writers’ New Writing Award for Poetry and Alligator Juniper’s 2011 National Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in publications including “The Kenyon Review,” “Orion,” “Slate,” “New England Review,” “Missouri Review,” and dozens of other journals. Rose earned her MFA from Warren Wilson’s MFA Program for Writers and has taught at the college, among other institutions. Currently, she is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Auburn University and Poetry Editor of The Southern Humanities Review.

September 15

Tina Mozelle Braziel, a graduate of the University of Oregon MFA program, directs the Ada Long Creative Writing Workshop at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in “The Cincinnati Review,” “Poetry South,” “Birmingham Poetry Review,” “Main Street Rag,” and “The Raleigh Review,” among other journals. She was awarded a Sewanee Writers’ Conference MFA Scholarship. She and her husband, novelist James Braziel, live and write in a glass cabin that they are building on Hydrangea Ridge.

September 15

Lauren Goodwin Slaughter is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She is author of the poetry collection, “a lesson in smallness” (National Poetry Review Press), a finalist for the Rousseau Prize in Literature and the Eric Hoffer Award in poetry. Her poems have appeared in venues such as “Blackbird,” “Carolina Quarterly,” “Crab Orchard Review,” “Kenyon Review,” and “Valparaiso Poetry Review.” She is an assistant professor of English at The University of Alabama at Birmingham and Editor of “PoemMemoirStory.”

October 6

Natasha Trethewey will read her work and present the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize 2016 honoring the late Alabama poet, Jake Adam York (1972-2012). The Auburn Witness Poetry Prize is annually awarded by Southern Humanities Review to recognize the best poems of witness by a poet in the United States. Trethewey, York’s teacher and friend, is the judge in this year’s competition. She is the author of four collections of poetry: “Domestic Work” (2000), Bellocq’s “Ophelia” (2002), “Native Guard” (2006), for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, and “Thrall” (2012), and the nonfiction collection “Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast,” composed of documentary poetry, essays and letters. She received a Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of Georgia, a Master of Arts in English and Creative Writing from Hollins University, and a MFA in Poetry from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. A former Auburn University professor, she now serves as the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University and director of their Creative Writing program. Trethewey was appointed the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States in 2012, serving two terms and ending her term in 2014. She was the first African American named to the position since Rita Dove, appointed in 1993. Also in 2012, she was named the Poet Laureate of the state of Mississippi, where she grew up in the coastal town of Gulfport.

***This reading is funded, in part, by a grant from South Arts in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts and the Alabama State Council on the Arts.***

October 20

Nadine Sabra Meyer is the author of “Chrysanthemum, Chrysanthemum,” which won The Green Rose Prize and is forthcoming with New Issues Poetry and Prose in the spring of 2017. Her first book of poetry, “The Anatomy Theater,” won the National Poetry Series, and was published by HarperCollins. Her poems have won the New Letters Prize for Poetry, the Meridian Editor’s Prize, and a Pushcart Prize. Nadine holds a BA from Johns Hopkins University, an MFA from George Mason University and a Ph.D from the University of Missouri, Columbia. Poems from “Chrysanthemum, Chrysanthemum,” have appeared in “The Southern Review,” “Southwest Review,” “Shenandoah,” “Literary Imagination,” “Boulevard,” “Nimrod,” “North American Review,” “storySouth,” “The Missouri Review,” “Prairie Schooner,” “Blackbird,” “Western Humanities Review” and “Ploughshares.” Nadine is an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Gettysburg College, where she lives with her daughter, her two dogs and their guinea pig.

November 17

Garrett Hongo was born in Hawai`i and grew up in Los Angeles. He attended Pomona College, the University of Michigan, and UC Irvine, where he received an MFA. His latest book of poetry, “Coral Road,” was published by Knopf in 2011. Author of “Volcano: A Memoir of Hawaii`i”, among his honors are the Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA grants, a Fulbright Fellowship, and the Lamont Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets. He teaches poetry at the University of Oregon while working currently on a book of non-fiction entitled “The Perfect Sound.”