Winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rome Prize, poet Mark Halliday is the author of Little Star (a National Poetry Series selection), Tasker Street (a Juniper Prize winner), Selfwolf, Jab, and Keep This Forever.  The New Yorker describes him as "prolix and quotidian, a Whitman in a supermarket, a confessional poet who does not take himself very seriously."  He teaches at Ohio University.   

                  Robins Room, Miller Library, 7:00 PM
                  Reception to follow in President's Room
                  Reading sponsored by Kristina Stahl Creative Writing Fund

Joan Wickersham is the author of the novel The Paper Anniversary and the recently released memoir The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death In Order.  Of her newest work, Publisher's Weekly writes, "Within the index of 'suicide,' (Wickersham) has found a form capacious enough for both intimate detail and general information; cold data and lyric moments; for mystery and for consolation."

Joan Wickersham's fiction has been included in magazines like AGNI, Glimmer Train, The Hudson Review, Ploughshares, and Story, and has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories. She has published essays in Glamour, Yankee, and The Boston Globe, and she has contributed and read on-air essays for National Public Radio's "On Point" and "Morning Edition."

                  Robins Room, Miller Library, 7:00 PM
                  Reception to follow in President's Room
                  Reading sponsored by Clark-Donnelley Fund for Visiting Writers
                  Ed Kenney Memorial reading

Alison Bechdel is author of Fun Home, a graphic novel that the Detroit Free Press calls a "staggeringly literate and revealing autobiography."  In 2006, numerous periodicals--including TIME, The New York Times, People, The San Francisco Chronicle and The Los Angeles Times--listed Bechdel's book as one of the best of the year.  Since 1983, her counter-cultural comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For has been syndicated in dozens of outlets.  Ms. describes Bechdel's strip as "one of the preeminent oeuvres in the comics genre, period."  Bechdel's work has won several Lambda Awards and an Eisner award.  USA Today says Bechdel's hybrid work is an "astonishing advertisement for the emerging literary form" of the graphic novel.

                  142 Diamond at 7:00 PM
                  Reception to follow in the Atrium
                  Talk co-sponsored by Women's Studies

Betsy Sholl, Maine's current Poet Laureate, is the author of six books, including Late Psalm, Don't Explain and The Red Line.  Describing her most recent title, poet David Jauss says,  "Imagine how Dante would have written if he were the daughter of Thelonious Monk and Mother Jones and you might have some idea of what Betsy Sholl's Late Psalm is like-a jazzy, heartfelt, no-nonsense Divine Comedy with a social conscience."  Sholl teaches at Stonecoast Writers Conference, the Frost Place, and Vermont College.  She has been visiting poet and poet-in-residence at numerous institutions.  Sholl is a two-time recipient of the Maine Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship Award, as well as the recipient of Vermont College's 1999 and 2002 Crowley/Weingarten Award for Excellence in Teaching and a 1994 National Endowment for the Arts Artists Fellowship. 

                  Robins Room, Miller Library, 7:00 PM
                  Reception to follow in President's Room
                  Reading sponsored by Clark-Donnelley Fund for Visiting Writers