December 3, 2010, Friday - Mentor Reading: Jonis Agee with Anna Henderson and Katie Leo at The Loft

Time:  7:00pm

Location: The Loft, 1011 Washington Avenue South

The 2010-2011 Loft Mentor Series in Poetry and Creative Prose presents fiction mentor Jonis Agee reading with program participants Anna Henderson and Katie Leo.

Anna Henderson (fiction) is a geologist who studies lake sediments to reconstruct past climates and ecosystems. As a writer, she is interested in expression of and meditation on the world around her through memoir and fiction. The tension between analytical and creative assessments of the world makes for a continual dialogue on the limits of the known and the possible that continue to inform both her science and art.

Katie Hae Leo (nonfiction) is a writer and educator. Her poetry, essays, monologues and articles have appeared in Water~Stone Review, Asian American Poetry & Writing, Journal of the Asian American Renaissance, 60 Seconds to Shine: One-Minute Monologues for Men, Utne and elsewhere. She has received an Academy of American Poets James Wright Prize, a Gesell Award, a Pushcart nomination and a Blacklock Fellowship, as well as funding from the Minnesota State Arts Board and Jerome Foundation. Her chapbook Attempts at Location was a finalist for the Tupelo Press Snowbound Award and is available through Finishing Line Press. Her play Four Destinies will be produced by Mu Performing Arts in 2011. She holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Minnesota and was in the Loft Mentor Series for Poetry in 2004-05.

Jonis Agee (fiction) was born in Omaha, Nebraska, and grew up in Nebraska and Missouri, places where many of her stories and novels are set. She was educated at the University of Iowa (BA) and the State University of New York at Binghamton (MA, PhD). She is Adele Hall Professor of English at The University of Nebraska — Lincoln, where she teaches creative writing and twentieth-century fiction. She is the author of thirteen books, including five novels — Sweet Eyes, Strange Angels, South of Resurrection, The Weight of Dreams and her most recent, The River Wife — and five collections of short fiction — Pretend We've Never Met, Bend This Heart, A .38 Special and a Broken Heart, Taking the Wall and Acts of Love on Indigo Road. She has also published two books of poetry: Houses and Mercury.