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

Apr
20
Mon
Ryser Scholarship Awarded
Apr 20 @ 12:09 pm – Aug 31 @ 1:09 pm
Ryser Scholarship Awarded

Ryser Scholarship Awarded

 

The Writers Guild at Bloomington is delighted to announce

that Hanh Tam Bui is the recipient of the 2020 Ryser Scholarship.

 

Hanh is a student at Bloomington High School South where she is a member of the Writing Club.

It also happens that the namesake of the scholarship, Joan Ryser, was an English teacher at BHSS.

Hanh will be attending A Gathering of Writers workshop at the Indianapolis Writers Center.

She will attend in March of 2021.

Congratulations Hanh!

Jun
4
Thu
NOTICE In the time of covid19
Jun 4 @ 7:45 am – Aug 31 @ 8:45 am

A Note

For now, Writers Guild in-person events are cancelled until we are all able to come together again.

We will be listing virtual events and keeping you informed.

Stay healthy, keep well, keep writing, keep communicating.

Jun
8
Mon
A statement from the Writers Guild at Bloomington
Jun 8 @ 10:00 am – Dec 31 @ 11:00 am

A statement from the Writers Guild at Bloomington

In light of the continued devaluation of Black lives, 

we denounce individual and structural racism.

We urge all people to continue the individual and

collective work toward diversity, equity, and inclusion.

All lives will matter only when Black lives matter.

Jul
1
Wed
First Wednesday Spoken Word Series virtual version
Jul 1 @ 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm
First Wednesday Spoken Word Series virtual version

First Weds Spoken Word Series

virtual version

Featuring poets Erik Fuhrer, Jeffrey Bean, Jennifer Payne

with music by ORTET x Urban Deer

For a Zoom link contact Tony Brewer beatnik_a_go_go@yahoo.com
OR
watch LIVE on the Writers Guild at Bloomington Facebook page


Sponsored in part by the
Indiana Arts Commission, Bloomington Arts Commission, and the
Bloomington Urban Enterprise Association – Indiana

ERIK FUHRER is a poet, artist, collaborator, and educator. With his wife, the painter Kimberly Androlowicz, he is co-collaborator of not human enough for the census (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2019) and in which I take myself hostage (Spuyten Duyvil Press, forthcoming 2020). Erik is the author of 3 additional poetry collections, all of which leverage poetic erasure: every time you die (Alien Buddha Press, 2019), which includes art by Marcel Herms,VOS (Yavanika Press, 2019), which includes redacted digital collages by the author, and At Root (Alien Buddha Press, 2020), which includes digital art by the author. His work has been a finalist for Survision’s Inaugural James Tate Chapbook Prize, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Microfictions, and Best of the Net. Erik received his MFA from the University of Notre Dame. He is currently an editorial assistant for International Studies in Literature and the Environment [ISLE] and a reader for Pidgeonholes. He has taught literature, writing and rhetoric, and creative writing at the University of Notre Dame, St. John’s University, Suffolk County Community College, and The College of New Rochelle. He has also worked at two Centers for Teaching: Notre Dame’s Kaneb Center for Teaching and Learning and the University of Iowa’s Center for Teaching, where he served as assistant director and regularly consulted with faculty and graduate students on various teaching topics, including teaching philosophies. Erik is available for individual consultations on teaching on request.
JEFFREY BEAN was raised in Bloomington, Indiana. He holds a Bachelor of Music degree in Jazz Guitar Performance from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and an MFA in Creative Writing/Poetry from the University of Alabama. From 2006-2008, he served as the Axton Fellow in Poetry at the University of Louisville. Currently, he lives with his wife Jessica and daughter Olivia in Mount Pleasant, MI, where he is Professor of English/Creative Writing at Central Michigan University. His first full length collection, Diminished Fifth, was published by David Robert Books in 2009. His chapbook Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window won the 2013 Vern Cowles/Copperdome Poetry Chapbook Prize and was published by Southeast Missouri State University Press, and his chapbook The Voyeur’s Litany won the Anabiosis Press Chapbook Contest and was published in 2016.  His second full-length collection, Woman Putting on Pearls, won the 2016 Red Mountain Poetry Prize and was published by Red Mountain Press. His poems have been featured on the NPR program The Writer’s Almanac and in Garrison Keillor’s anthology Good Poems, American Places.  Recent poems appear in the journals FIELD, Slate.com, Southern Poetry Review, The Missouri Review, Crab Orchard Review, Subtropics, Smartish Pace, and River Styx, among others.
JENNIFER PAYNE is a multi-disciplinary artist from Bloomington Indiana. She studied Creative Writing at Indiana University and represented IU in the College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational in 2017. She has participated in her local slam community for 4 years. Jennifer also makes wire wrapped jewelry and operates a small, local, handmade style shop.
ORTET, a projection of Urban Deer, combine spoken word and ambient field recordings with an improvisational sound bed, exploring the edges of music, culture, and location. Featuring Marty Belcher (saxes), Tony Brewer (foley), Norbert Herber (fx) Chris Rall (turntablism + sax), Joe MF Stone (drums + mixage)

Aug
5
Wed
First Wednesday Spoken Word Series virtual version
Aug 5 @ 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm

First Weds Spoken Word Series

virtual version

TWO WAYS TO EXPERIENCE:
Drop a note to beatnik_a_go_go@yahoo.com and we will send you the ZOOM link
OR
watch LIVE on the Writers Guild at Bloomington page
WEDNESDAY, AUG 5
6pm EST
featuring
a Hiroshima Day observance by Hiromi Yoshida
authors Laurie Stone, Katy Yocom, and poet Jason Ammerman
with music by Sarah Cassidy
Sponsored in part by the Indiana Arts Commission, Bloomington Arts Commission, and the Bloomington Urban Enterprise Association – Indiana
LAURIE STONE is author of 5 books, most recently of Everything is Personal, Notes on Now, about which Masha Gessen recently wrote in The New Yorker, “The title of the book references one of the central arguments of nineteen-sixties feminism, from which Stone hails intellectually: ‘The personal is political.’ It also describes our current predicament–everything that is not personal has vanished–and suggests a way of thinking sharply, imaginatively, beautifully, from right here.”
KATY YOCOM was born and raised in Atchison, Kansas. Her debut novel, Three Ways to Disappear, won the Siskiyou Prize for New Environmental Literature and the First Horizon Award, among others, and was named a Barnes & Noble Top Indie Favorite. In researching the novel, she traveled to India, funded by a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation. The book’s release received coverage in India’s leading newspaper, the Times of India, and made the front page of the Jaipur Times. Katy was a 2019 recipient of the Al Smith Fellowship Award for artistic excellence from the Kentucky Arts Council. She has written for Newsweek, Salon, LitHub, American Way (the American Airlines in-flight magazine), Terrain.org, and elsewhere. A graduate of the low-residency MFA in Writing program at Spalding University, she lives in Louisville and serves as associate director of the graduate programs of Spalding’s School of Creative and Professional Writing.
JASON AMMERMAN is a poet from Indianapolis, Indiana and has performed at the Green Mill Lounge at the Uptown Poetry Slam, the Bloomington Poetry Slam in Bloomington, and coached a slam team for the inaugural Midwest Poetry Slam League. He is the author of three collections of poetry: All Grown Up (2006), Microphone or Bust! (2008), and Battle Scarred (2012). He released his first full-length spoken word album, Revival, in 2018 through Perfect Mix Records. He lives in Indianapolis with his son and dog.
HIROMI YOSHIDA, one of Bloomington’s finest and most outspoken poets, was a semi-finalist for the 2018 Wilder Series Poetry Book Prize. Her poems have been published in The Indianapolis Review, The Asian American Literary Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, Evergreen Review, and The Rain, Party, & Disaster Society. She is the author of Joyce & Jung: The “Four Stages of Eroticism” in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and the chapbook Icarus Burning.
SARAH CASSIDY is a singer-songwriter who idolizes guitar-wielding women and personal, poetic, and eccentric storytelling. Inspired by the likes of Joni Mitchell, Alanis Morissette, Dodie Clark, and Jack Johnson, Sarah has been performing her original music around Indiana since her freshman year of high school. At Indiana University, she currently studies Voice at the Jacobs School of Music, with an outside field study in Arts Management, but if you asked her nicely to put all that on hold to do a big ol’ tour she would probably say yes.

Aug
15
Sat
Writers Guild Business Meeting Virtual
Aug 15 @ 3:00 pm – 4:30 pm

Writers Guild Business Meeting

Virtual via Zoom

Saturday, August 15

3-4:30

For the ZOOM LINK please contact Joan Hawkins (jchawkin93@yahoo.com).

Sep
2
Wed
First Wednesday Spoken Word Series virtual version
Sep 2 @ 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm

Spoken Word Stage Series

Presented by the Writers Guild at Bloomington
TWO WAYS TO EXPERIENCE:
Email demand4poetry@gmail.com or msg the Writers Guild on facebook and we will send you the ZOOM link
OR
watch LIVE on the Writers Guild at Bloomington page
WEDNESDAY, SEP 2
6pm EST
featuring
poets Karen George, Hiromi Yoshida, and Brooke Nicole Plummer
with music by Julian Douglas
Sponsored in part by the Indiana Arts Commission, Bloomington Arts Commission, and the Bloomington Urban Enterprise Association – Indiana
KAREN GEORGE is author of five chapbooks, and two poetry collections from Dos Madres Press: Swim Your Way Back (2014) and A Map and One Year (2018). Her work has appeared in Adirondack Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, South Dakota Review, Naugatuck River Review, and Tipton Poetry Journal. She reviews poetry at Poetry Matters:  http://readwritepoetry.blogspot.com/, and is co-founder and fiction editor of the online journal, Waypoints:  http://www.waypointsmag.com/. Visit her website at: https://karenlgeorge.blogspot.com/.
HIROMI YOSHIDA, one of Bloomington’s finest and most outspoken poets, was a semi-finalist for the 2018 Wilder Series Poetry Book Prize. Her poems have been published in The Indianapolis Review, The Asian American Literary Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, Evergreen Review, and The Rain, Party, & Disaster Society. She is the author of Joyce & Jung: The “Four Stages of Eroticism” in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and the chapbook Icarus Burning.
BROOKE NICOLE PLUMMER is a writer and musician from the Midwest region. Her first full-length collection of poems, “Flyover, Compiled Nothings”, was self- published in November of 2018. As a performance artist, she goes by “The Rotten Fruit”.
JULIAN DOUGLAS is a percussionist, composer of contemporary world music, and a founding member of the world percussion ensemble Rhythm Quest. Julian’s influences include musical traditions from Europe, the African diaspora, Asia, and the Middle East, but his focus has been on the creation of new music that seeks to honor the brilliance and beauty of the world’s traditions while pursuing opportunities for creativity and innovation.

Sep
5
Sat
Spoken Word Stage @ 4th Street Festival of Arts & Crafts
Sep 5 @ 9:00 am

This year the Forth Street Festival of Arts & Crafts

is VIRTUAL

And the SPOKEN WORD STAGE

presented by the Writers Guild at Bloomington

is VIRTUAL

Click HERE to join us in the TENT   

https://www.4thstreet.org/spokenwordstage

 

and visit the artists’ tents and all (except the food)

on the Festival website!

Sep
19
Sat
Writers Guild Business Meeting Virtual
Sep 19 @ 3:00 pm – 4:30 pm
Writers Guild Business Meeting Virtual

Writers Guild Business Meeting

Virtual via Zoom

Saturday, September 19

3-4:30

For the ZOOM LINK please contact Joan Hawkins (jchawkin93@yahoo.com).

Oct
7
Wed
First Wednesday Spoken Word Series virtual version
Oct 7 @ 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm

Spoken Word Stage Series

Presented by the Writers Guild at Bloomington
TWO WAYS TO EXPERIENCE:
Email demand4poetry@gmail.com or msg the Writers Guild on facebook and we will send you the ZOOM link
OR
watch LIVE on the Writers Guild at Bloomington page
WEDNESDAY, SEP 2
6pm EST
featuring
Poet & novelist @EileenMyles live from NYC
Outlaw poet Ron Whitehead live from KY
Music: The Storm Generation
Sponsored in part by Darkstar TV, the Indiana Arts Commission, Bloomington Arts Commission, and the Bloomington Urban Enterprise Association – Indiana

EILEEN MYLES (they/them) came to New York from Boston in 1974 to be a poet, subsequently novelist, public talker and art journalist. A Sagittarius, their 22 books include , , , / & , and . In 2019 they wrote and directed an 18-minute super 8 film, , a puppet road film. See it on youtube. Eileen is the recipient of a Guggenheim, a Warhol/Creative Capital Arts Writers grant, 4 Lambda Book Awards, the Shelley Prize, and a poetry award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. In 2016, they received a Creative Capital grant and the Clark Prize for excellence in art writing. In 2019 Myles received a poetry award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. In 2020 they got the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Publishing Triangle. They live in New York and Marfa, TX. Eileen photo by Shae Detar.

RON WHITEHEAD is a poet, writer, editor, publisher, organizer, scholar, professor. He grew up on a farm in Kentucky. He attended The University of Louisville and Oxford University. As poet and writer he is the recipient of numerous state, national, and international awards/prizes including the All-Kentucky Poetry Prize, the Yeats Club of Oxford’s Prize for Poetry, State of Kentucky Beat Poet Laureate 2019-2021, and many others. He has been a major force behind GonzoFest in Louisville, celebrating the legacy of Hunter S. Thompson. In 2006 Dr. John Rocco (NYC) nominated Ron for The Nobel Prize in Literature. He was recently inducted into his high school’s (Ohio County High) Hall of Fame, representing his 1968 graduating class. THE STORM GENERATION are regular conspirators. Ron photo by Yunier Ramirez.


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