October 13, 2011, Thursday - 5th Annual Mother Words Reading at The Loft

Time: 7:00pm

Location: The Loft at Open Book (Performance Hall) 1011 Washington Avenue South

Authors Jill Christman and Sonya Huber will join local author and Loft teaching artist, Kate Hopper, for the 5th Annual Mother Words Reading. Kate launched this reading series in 2007 as a way to highlight some of the wonderful, literary writing out there about motherhood and to counteract the way the public dismisses motherhood literature. 

Join us for a reading, laughter, and refreshments and mingle with other mothers who write.

Jill Christman’s memoir, Darkroom: A Family Exposure, won the AWP Award Series in Creative Nonfiction and was published by the University of Georgia Press in 2002. It will be released in paperback October, 2011. Recent essays appearing in River Teeth and Harpur Palate have been honored by Pushcart nominations and her writing has been published in Barrelhouse, Brevity, Descant, Literary Mama, Mississippi Review, Wondertime, and many other journals, magazines, and anthologies. She teaches creative nonfiction in Ashland University’s low-residency MFA program and at Ball State University in Muncie where she lives with her husband, writer Mark Neely, and their two children.

Kate Hopper received her MFA in creative writing from the University of Minnesota. She has been the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship to Costa Rica, a Gesell summer residency at the Anderson Center in Red Wing, and a 2008 MN State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant. Her writing has appeared in a number of journals and magazines, including Brevity, Literary Mama, Mamazine, and the New York Times online. She is finishing work on Small Continents, a memoir about learning to live with uncertainty in the wake of her daughter’s premature birth. Her first book, Use Your Words: A Writing Guide for Mothers is forthcoming from Viva Editions in Spring 2012. She teaches online and at The Loft Literary Center, leads an annual writing retreat for mothers, and reviews motherhood literature on her blog, Mother Words: Mothers Who Write.

Sonya Huber is the author of two books of creative nonfiction, Cover Me: A Health Insurance Memoir (2010), finalist for the 2010 Grub Street National Book Prize in Nonfiction, and Opa Nobody (2008), shortlisted for the Saroyan Prize. She has also written a textbook, The Backwards Research Guide for Writers: Using Your Life for Reflection, Connection, and Inspiration (2010). Her work has been published in literary journals and magazines including The Sonora Review, Fourth Genre, Passages North, Hotel Amerika, Crab Orchard Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and the Washington Post Magazine, in other journals and in many anthologies. She teaches in the Low-Residency MFA Program at Ashland University.

This event will be recorded and is free and open to the public.