November 5, 2010, Friday - Mentor Series: C.J. Hribal at The Loft

Time: 7:00pm

Location: The Loft Literary Center, 1011 Washington Avenue South

The 2010-2011 Loft Mentor Series in Poetry and Creative Prose presents fiction mentor C.J. Hribal reading with program participants Michael Schurter and Natalie Vestin.

Michael A. Schurter (fiction) has published poetry and short fiction and has produced stage plays in the United States and Canada. A former academic and theatrical producer/director/administrator, Michael has lectured on theatre, film, and cultural history at colleges and universities in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. He is partner and creative lead at Virgo Visions, a Minneapolis-based creative services firm. A Canadian by birth and a Minneapolitan by choice, he lives and farms his backyard near Lake Harriet with his wife Megan and son Tristan.

Natalie Vestin (nonfiction) is a writer and public health researcher who lives in St. Paul. She writes to communicate her love of place and home in all of its complex beauty and ugliness. She has studied nature writing under David Gessner at Orion Magazine’s Wildbranch Writing Workshop, and has studied writing and shamanism with the poet Ruth L. Schwartz. She teaches yoga in the Twin Cities and enjoys incorporating reflective writing exercises into her classes.

C.J. Hribal (fiction) is the author of the novels The Company Car, which received the Anne Powers Book Award, and American Beauty, and of the short fiction collections Matty’s Heart and The Clouds in Memphis, which won the AWP Award for Short Fiction.  He also edited The Boundaries of Twilight: Czecho-Slovak Writing from the New World. He has held Fellowships from the NEA, the Bush, and from the Guggenheim Foundations. He teaches at Marquette University, and is a member of the fiction faculty at the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers.