The Writers Guild at Bloomington is an association of writers committed to mutual support and the professional development of their craft. Its mission is to foster interaction among writers as well as other artists, educators, and the Monroe County public, thereby enhancing the vibrancy of the arts and the writing community in the greater Bloomington area.
Events Calendar
Constellation Stage & Screen presents
The True Story of the Three Little Pigs!
on stage October 25 – November 10 at the Waldron Auditorium
A musical “tail” that will bring the house down! There are two sides to every story, and when the Big Bad Wolf takes the stand in Piggsylvania’s Trial of the Century, he finally gets his say. But whether he’ll get a fair trial in a corrupt piggy court is anyone’s guess. Will the pigs’ splashy show make a puppet out of justice, or is the wolf’s song and dance about a sneeze gone wrong all razzle-dazzle? Enter the jury box and help decide the fate of Big ‘n’ Bad in this musical adaptation of the hit children’s book.
Fun for all ages! Featuring a Sensory-Friendly performance on Sun, November 10 at 4:00pm (tickets to this performance are Pay What You Will).
For showtimes, tickets, and more information, visit https://seeconstellation.org/kids/three-little-pigs/
Appreciation E
vent and
Art Exhibit
for Writers Guild Member
Bronislava Volkova
Volkova is a Czech-American poet, scholar, translator and artist. She emigrated from Czechoslovakia in 1974 and spent more than 40 years in the United States. She has 22 volumes of poetry in addition to her other work.
There will be some music, and introduction by CAHI director Brenda Weber and Russell Valentino, and 15-20 minutes of Volkova reading her work.
This will be followed by a conversation between Volkova, Eric Rensberger, and Joan Hawkins about artistic process.
Friday November 8, 5-7 p.m. in the College Arts and Humanities Institute on IU Campus–Cook Center for Public Arts and Humanities, Gayle Karch, 750 E Kirkwood Ave, Bloomington, IN 47405 (walk through the Sample Gates and keep going toward the Indiana Memorial Union).
The event will be in the Great Hall. The event is free and open to the public.
A special Pop-up Chitlin Circuit
Facilitated by Indiana State Poet Laureate Curtis Crisler
Featuring poets Ross Gay, Hiromi Yoshida, Curtis Crisler
Open mic to follow
Sponsored in part by the Writers Guild at Bloomington, Indiana Arts Commission, Bloomington Arts Commission, and the Bloomington Urban Enterprise Association
THURSDAY, NOV 14 6pm EST
Backspace Gallery inside Bonne Fête
112 West 6th Street on the square in Bloomington IN
The Indiana Chitlin Circuit is based on the historical Chitlin Circuit that sprouted during the period of Jim Crow segregation. African American performers weren’t necessarily allowed to share a stage with white performers. A network of live entertainment venues in the US emerged that catered to black audiences and black entertainers.
CURTIS L. CRISLER was born and raised in Gary, Indiana. His book Doing Drive-Bys on How to Love in the Midwest won the C&R Press Award for poetry. His other books include (with Kevin McKelvey) Indiana Nocturnes: Our Rural and Urban Patchwork; THe GReY aLBuM [PoeMS], a Steel Toe Books open reading period selection; Don’t Moan So Much (Stevie): A Poetry Musiquarium; “This” Ameri-can-ah; and Pulling Scabs, nominated for Pushcart Prize. Crisler is Professor of English at Purdue University Fort Wayne. He is the current Indiana State Poet Laureate.
Author of one full-length poetry collection and four poetry chapbooks, HIROMI YOSHIDA is a finalist for the New Women’s Voices Poetry Prize, and a semifinalist for the Gerald Cable Book Award. While serving as a poetry reader for Flying Island Journal, and as secretary of the Writers Guild at Bloomington, she coordinates the Guild’s Last Sunday Poetry reading series.
ROSS GAY is the author of four books of poetry: Against Which; Bringing the Shovel Down; Be Holding, winner of the PEN American Literary Jean Stein Award; and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. In addition to his poetry, Ross has released three collections of essays—The Book of Delights was released in 2019 and was a New York Times bestseller; Inciting Joy was released in 2022, and his newest collection, The Book of (More) Delights was released in September of 2023.
Join us for our author event with Bronislava Volkova!
Bronislava Volková is a Czech-American poet, translator, scholar and collage artist. She emigrated from Czechoslovakia in 1974 and spent more than forty years in the United States.
She taught at six universities in three different countries, e.g. University of Cologne, University of Marburg, University of Virginia and Harvard University. Her home university eventually became Indiana University Bloomington,[5][7] where she taught since 1982 in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and for thirty years led the Czech program.[7] She became a Full Professor in 1991.
She is the author of many academic articles and two monographs from linguistic and literary semiotics: Emotive Signs in Language (1987)[8] and A Feminist’s Semiotic Odyssey through Czech Literature (1997).[9][10] Her newest work is a book of essays Forms of Exile in Jewish Literature and Thought:Twentieth-Century Central Europe and Migration to America (2021),[11] Czech version Podoby exilu v židovské literatuře a myšlení: Střední Evropa ve dvacátém století a přesun do Ameriky (2022).[12] Between the years 1976 and 1992, her work appeared under the name Bronislava Volek.[7]
Volková contributed to theory and structure of emotive signs and meanings,[13] developing differences between emotivity, expressivity, intensity and values, to Russian word-formation, pragmatics, etc. She has also worked on functions of linguistic repetition in Russian and Spanish dialogue, levels of emphasis in Russian, Spanish and Czech syntax and other semiotic topics.
Apart from her linguistic analyses, she has applied her semiotic theory to the work of important Czech authors[14] (Mácha, Kundera, Němcová, Hrabal,[15] Čapek, Havel and others). Her literary analyses focus on gender, responsibility, guilt, innocence, racism, nationalism, eurocentrism, relationship between private and public sphere, escape and vision, death and other topics.[7] She also analyzed poetry on the basis of emotive signs and meanings, characterizing the poetics of individual authors or poems via typology and frequency of emotive signs used. Her work was reviewed in a number of countries and parts of it were translated into Czech, Russian, German and Spanish.
Writers Guild at Bloomington Monthly Business Meeting
November 16, 2024
3-4:30 pm
Room 214 at the Downtown Monroe County Public Library
The Writers’ Guild at Bloomington presents
The Firehouse Follies
Keep Bloomington Weird!
The Firehouse Follies is a worldwide showcase for the amazing talent we have in Bloomington and South Central Indiana. A live broadcast performance features audio theatre plays and comedy sketches by the Mighty Firehouse Art Players, music from Kid Kazooey and the Four-Alarm Orchestra, special musical guest Krista Detor, and poetry created by Indiana’s Literary Champion, Tony Brewer. The audience becomes part of the two-hour show at the Waldron Auditorium, starting at 2 p.m. November 17, so come and join us! The Follies webpage is https://wfhb.org/category/
Broadcast and streamed live over WFHB, 91.3 FM and http://www.wfhb.org. Live Streams:
http://www.radiorethink.com/
http://radio.garden/listen/
Tickets
https://buskirkchumley.org/
Waldron Arts Center 122 S. Walnut St., Bloomington IN 47404 (corner of 4th and Walnut)
Poets Celebration for Jenny Kander
Wednesday November 20th at the Runcible Spoon
Time TBA but we are thinking 6 pm is a good time to show up.
The Spoon will provide the space, appetizers, beer and wine. Poets to read from their own and her work. Please, all are welcome and we would love to see you there!!!
The Writers Guild at Bloomington presents
Last Sunday Poetry
& Open Mic
featuring Kerry Trautman and Shannon K. Winston
Ohio born and raised, KERRY TRAUTMAN is a co-founder of ToledoPoet.com and the “Toledo Poetry Museum” page on Facebook which promote Northwest Ohio poetry events. She has served as judge for the Northwest region of Ohio’s “Poetry Out Loud” competition annually since 2016. Kerry is a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, and her poetry and fiction have appeared in numerous international journals and anthologies. She is the author of 7 books of poetry, and her most recent book is a novella titled Irregulars.
SHANNON K. WINSTON is the author of The Worry Dolls (Glass Lyre Press, forthcoming) and The Girl Who Talked to Paintings (Glass Lyre Press, 2021). Her individual poems have appeared in Bracken, Cider Press Review, Los Angeles Review, RHINO Poetry, SWWIM Every Day, West Trestle Review, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers and a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. She’s currently at work on a poetry collection based on the history of photography. In addition to writing poetry, she’s also a dedicated educator and has taught for numerous institutions, including the University of Michigan, Princeton University, and Indiana University. She lives in Bloomington, Indiana with her partner and dog.
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 24
7-8:30 PM (EST)
Morgenstern’s Bookstore & Café
849 S Auto Mall Rd
Bloomington IN 47401
Join the Writers Guild for an exciting afternoon with our special guest, Angela Jackson-Brown. Open mic to follow.
Angela Jackson-Brown is an award-winning writer, poet and playwright who is an Associate Professor in the creative writing program at Indiana University in Bloomington. She also teaches in the graduate program at the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University in Louisville, KY. She is a graduate of Troy University, Auburn University and the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University. She has published her short fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry in journals like The Louisville Journal and the Appalachian Review. She is the author of Drinking From a Bitter Cup, House Repairs, When Stars Rain Down and The Light Always Breaks. Her novels have received starred reviews from the Library Journal and glowing reviews from Alabama Public Library, Buzzfeed, Parade Magazine, and Women’s Weekly, just to name a few. When Stars Rain Down was named a finalist for the 2021 David J. Langum, Sr. Prize in American Historical Fiction, longlisted for the Granum Foundation Award, and shortlisted for the 2022 Indiana Authors Award. In October of 2023, Angela’s novel, Homeward, a follow-up to When Stars Rain Down, was published by Harper Muse.
First Sunday Prose Reading Series
Sunday, December 1, 2024
The Juniper Art Gallery and Cafe
This holiday season, Constellation Stage & Screen presents
The Wizard of Oz
on stage December 12 – 29 at the Buskirk-Chumley Theater.
We’re off to see the Wizard! Step into the magical world of The Wizard of Oz, one of the most beloved films all time, in this bewitching family holiday musical! Travel down the Yellow Brick Road with Dorothy and Toto in a whimsical journey filled with iconic songs, like “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and “If I Only Had a Brain.”
An absolute delight for audiences of all ages, The Wizard of Oz invites you to discover the magical power of home!
Fun for all ages! Featuring a Pay What You Will performance on Thursday, December 12.
For showtimes, tickets, and more information, visit https://seeconstellation.org/kids/wizard-of-oz/