Athens, Ga. – The Georgia Review, the University of Georgia’s internationally known quarterly journal of arts and letters, concludes several months of 60th anniversary celebratory events with a two-day literary festival Feb. 26 – 27 on the UGA campus, where the Review was founded and has operated continuously throughout its first six decades. All events are open to the public free of charge.
The Georgia Review will present readings and panel conversations by four important American writers who have been significantly involved with the journal’s success in recent years and whose own varied literary careers have been bolstered by their association with the Review. The program is made possible in part by support from UGA’s Willson Center for Humanities and Arts.
Participants will be Albert Goldbarth, the prolific poet and essayist who is the only two-time winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry and who has had thirty poems and six essays in The Georgia Review; Paul Zimmer, a poet, essayist and publisher whose distinguished career as the director of various university presses included several years (1978-84) with the UGA Press; Judith Kitchen, an essayist, novelist, poet, publisher, anthologist and critic who has written semiannual essay-reviews of contemporary poetry collections for the Review since 1990; and Kevin Brockmeier, an up-and-coming fiction writer who has published a short story collection and two novels since his initial Georgia Review appearance in 1999.
The celebration begins in Demosthenian Hall at 3:30 p.m. on Monday, Feb. 26, with a one-hour panel discussion about literary book publishing in the United States by Zimmer and Kitchen. Zimmer and Kitchen, who have sixty years combined experience with publishing, will entertain questions from the audience throughout the session. The session will be moderated by the Review’s acting editor, Stephen Corey.
Zimmer and Kitchen will read from their work in the UGA Chapel at 7 p.m. A reception and book signing will follow.
Goldbarth and Brockmeier will join Zimmer and Kitchen for a round-table discussion of the state and importance of past and current literary magazine publishing in the United States on Tuesday, Feb. 27 at 3:30 p.m. in the UGA Chapel. Corey and Georgia Review assistant editor David Ingle will moderate and questions from the audience will be welcomed.
Brockmeier and Goldbarth will read in the Chapel at 7 p.m. A reception and book signing will follow.
About the Participants:
Albert Goldbarth: Goldbarth has twenty-odd books of poems and essays and one novel to his credit, including his The Kitchen Sink: New and Selected Poems, 1972-2007 (Graywolf Press), to be released on March 6. Among his earlier works are three volumes from the University of Georgia Press: Heaven and Earth: A Cosmology (poems, 1991), Across the Layers: Poems Old and New (1993), and Dark Waves and Light Matter (essays, 1999). A Chicago native and the longtime Distinguished Poet in Residence at Wichita State University, Goldbarth boasts one of the world’s finest collections of Ace double novels.
Paul Zimmer: In April 2007, The University of Georgia Press will release Zimmer’s thirteenth poetry collection, Crossing to Sunlight Revisited: New and Selected Poems. Earlier volumes include Family Reunion (1983), winner of an Award for Literature from the Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters; The Great Bird of Love (1989), selected by William Stafford for publication in the National Poetry Series; and Big Blue Train (1993). In recent years, Zimmer has written and published many essays. The University of Minnesota Press brought out the collection After the Fire: A Writer Finds His Place (2002)-whose title essay appeared in The Georgia Review-and Kent State University Press then released Trains in the Distance (2003). Since 1999, he has written annual essay-reviews of recent poetry chapbooks for the Review. After retiring from the directorship of the University of Iowa Press a decade ago, Zimmer moved with his wife Suzanne to a small farm in rural Wisconsin
Judith Kitchen: After two poetry collections, Upstairs Window (1983) and Perennials (1986), Kitchen shifted almost exclusively to writing and editing prose. She published a pair of essay collections, Only the Dance: Essays on Time and Memory (1994) and Distance and Direction (2001) and then a novel, The House on Eccles Road (2002). The latter, told from the perspective of Molly Bloom from James Joyce’s Ulysses, was originally published by Graywolf Press and then issued in paperback by Viking-Penguin in this country and by Townhouse Publishing in Ireland. Kitchen has also edited three volumes of brief nonfiction pieces for W. W. Norton: In Short (1996), In Brief (1999), and Short Takes (2005). In the early 1980s, she founded State Street Press, which she ran and edited for two decades. A longtime teacher of English and creative writing at the State University of New York in, Kitchen now lives in Port Townsend, Wash. and teaches at the Rainier Writing Workshop, a low-residency master of fine arts program based at Pacific Lutheran University.
Kevin Brockmeier: Kevin Brockmeier is the author of the novels The Brief History of the Dead (2006) and The Truth About Celia (2003) and the story collection Things That Fall From the Sky (2002), all published by Pantheon. He is the author of the children’s novels City of Names (Viking Juvenile, 2002) and Grooves: A Kind of Mystery (Katherine Tegen Books, 2006). In addition to the three stories published in The Georgia Review, his work has appeared in The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, The Oxford American, Granta, The Best American Short Stories, the O. Henry: Prize Stories anthology and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. He is the recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts fellowship, three O. Henry prizes and the Borders Original Voices Award. He lives in Little Rock, Arkansas.
