Riverviews celebrates the work of nine emerging writers from Randolph College’s Creative Writing Program. Come out on February 16th at 7:30pm to support these new voices appearing on the Lynchburg literary scene:
Previous Third Thursday Events
Feb 062012
Jan 122012
This month, Riverviews is excited to welcome three wonderfully talented writers currently in residence at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts:
Nancy K. Barry is both a teacher and a writer of creative nonfiction at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa and the University of Iowa’s Summer Writing Festival. Her essays have appeared in Iowa Woman, the Chicago Tribune and the Baltimore Sun, and for several years she contributed radio essays to Iowa Public Radio. She is the author of the one-woman play, Lessons from Cancer College, performed in the Midwest in 2010, and funded in part by a grant from the Iowa Arts Council. She has been a guest at two Minnesota residencies: The Anderson Center in Red Wing and the Collegeville Institute, and is spending this month as a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, working on a nonfiction essay about one of the earliest social workers in America, Lillian Wald, who founded the Visiting Nurses Society and the Henry Street Settlement in the lower east side of Manhattan.
Jessica Garratt’s book Fire Pond won the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry and was published by the University of Utah Press in 2009. She earned her PhD at the University of Missouri, and in last spring held a visiting teaching appointment at Wichita State University. She has received fellowships from the Carson McCullers Center, MacDowell Colony, ART342, and from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin, where she earned her MFA. Jessica’s poems have appeared in journals such as Michigan Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, The Missouri Review, Literary Imagination, and new work is forthcoming in Western Humanities Review and Colorado Review. She is currently a writer-in-residence at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, where she is working on her second book of poems.
Elizabeth Poliner is the author of Mutual Life & Casualty, a novel-in-stories, and Sudden Fog, and chabpook of poems. Her work has appeared in many literary journals, including The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Laurel Review. She’s been awarded seven grants in fiction from the D.C. Commission on the Arts (and one in poetry), and has been a fiction scholar at both the Sewannee and Bread Loaf writers’ conferences. She teaches in the graduate and undergraduate creative writing programs at Hollins University’s Jackson Center for Creative Writing. While she’s at VCCA this month, she’s working on a novel.
Sep 222011
Oct. 20, 2011 at 7:30PM
David Schwartz will be reading and discussing selections from his work, “Consuming Choices.”
Chair of the Philosophy Department, Professor of Philosophy
B.A., Texas Christian University; M.A., Ph.D., Rice University
I teach a wide range of philosophy courses, including Ethics, Environmental Philosophy, Philosophy of Art, and Classical Greek Philosophy. I have published numerous articles on ethics and the philosophy of art, as well as a book on federal funding for the arts.
My newest book, Consuming Choices, was published in April 2010, by Rowman and Littlefield. The book explores whether consumers have moral obligations to boycott products made with immoral practices such as slave labor, animal cruelty, or environmental harm.
In my spare time, I like to play with my crazy chocolate lab, Dolly, and my two wily cats, Satchmo and Edith. I also spend time co-producing a weekly show for WWRM, Randolph’s student radio station, and working on and driving my mobile artwork, “The Ant Car”.
Aug 062011
Third Thursday: November 17th at 7:30pm, free and open to the public
THIS EVENT WILL BE ON THE GROUND FLOOR OF RIVERVIEWS
Becky Mushko‚ retired middle school teacher, retired adjunct English instructor at Ferrum College, and 2006-07 writer-in-residence for Roanoke County Schools‚ currently writes children’s literature.
Born in Roanoke, Becky has lived in Richmond, VA; Newport News, VA; Lanesboro, MA; and Charleston, SC. She currently lives in rural Penhook, Virginia, with her husband, two horses, four dogs, and numerous cats. Her hobbies include attending writers’ conferences, walking her farms with her dogs, trail riding (she owns an elderly racking mare and a 22-year-old TWH), blogging, living frugally, and reading—especially Southern writers and Appalachian writers.
She received her BFA in Drama Education from VCU (when it was still RPI) and her MAT in English Education from The Citadel. She’s also taken graduate classes at UVA, Radford, and High Point College.
Becky participates in several reading or writing-related clubs: an SCBWI critique group for children’s writers, the Virginia Writers Club, Lake Writers, Valley Writers, the Roanoke Valley Branch of the American Pen Women, and the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. She currently serves as vice-president of the Franklin County Library Board of Trustees, vice-president of Lake Writers, recording secretary for Virginia Writers Club Board of Governors, and co-chair of both the Lake Writers Essay Contest for Young People and the Roanoke Valley Pen Women’s Scholarship Contest.
She was a panelist on the “Regional Fiction” panel at the 2007 Children’s Literature Association Conference, on the “Sense of Place: Retelling Appalachain Folk Tales” panel at the 2011 ChLA Conference, and on the
“Local Fiction” panel for the 2006 Roanoke Valley Bookfest. She has participated in several bookfests in Bedford, Franklin, and Hanover Counties since 2002. Winner of several writing contests, she was once nominated for a 1997 Pushcart Prize for “Angel on Ice,” which appeared in THEMA.
For over 10 years, she wrote a humor column, “Peevish Advice,” that first appeared in Blue Ridge Traditions (from 1998-2004) and then the Smith Mountain Eagle (from 2004 through 2008). Occasionally she still makes appearances as her character, Ida B. Peevish of Ida’s Salon of Beauty & Live Bait Shop.
Sept 15 at 7:30 pm. 
Kirk Nesset is author of two books of short stories, Mr. Agreeable and Paradise Road, as well as a book of translations, Alphabet of the World: Selected Works by Eugenio Montejo; he is also author of a nonfiction study, The Stories of Raymond Carver, and a book of poems, Saint X (forthcoming). He was awarded the Drue Heinz literature prize in 2007 and has received a Pushcart Prize and grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. His stories, poems, translations and essays have appeared in hundreds of journals, including The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, American Poetry Review, Gettysburg Review, Iowa Review, Ploughshares, Agni, The Sun and Prairie Schooner, among others. His short short fictions have been widely anthologized, appearing in W. W. Norton’s Flash Fiction Forward, New Sudden Fiction, Sudden Fiction Latino, and elsewhere.
Nesset grew up in northern California, close to the coast, and studied at University of California Santa Cruz (BA) and at University of California Santa Barbara (MA, PhD), as well as abroad. He has worked as a dishwasher, a tree planter, a telemarketer, a car parker, a caterer, a writing consultant and a salesman selling wood stoves. Currently he is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania. He serves summers as faculty at Black Forest Writing Seminars (Freiburg, Germany), and teaches regularly as fiction writer in residence at the Chautauqua Literary Institute (Chautauqua, NY). He also plays guitar and sings in a rock group, Unkle John’s Band, and DJs on FM radio, shows featuring gothic, darkwave, EBM, cyber pop and electro-industrial music. He is fond of mountain biking, kayaking and rollerblading, and lives with three cats and a mini-Pomeranian dog.
You’ve been waiting and it’s finally here…You’re chance to show the world how awesome you are
Riverviews Artspace is hosting its 4th Annual Stammer! Open Mic night for the May Third Thursday Event on May 19!
This Stammer Night is to support and promote up and coming artists who perform spoken word and poetry performances and performance art. Bring your friends and families and watch the best talent in downtown Lynchburg.
Open-mic performers sign up the night of the event for a time-slot (5 minute max). Pre-registration not required. The featured performers begin the evening followed by open-mic performances. Everyone welcome to perform. Free and open to the public.
Feb 222011
March 17 at 7:30
In his soon to be released novel, The Watery Part of the World, Michael Parker has created a wholly original world from two known facts: (1) Theodosia Burr Alston, daughter of the controversial vice president Aaron Burr, disappeared in 1813 while en route by schooner from South Carolina to New York; and (2) in 1970, two elderly white women and one black man were the last townspeople to leave a small barrier island off the coast of North Carolina.
In this fiction based on historical fact, Parker weaves a tale of adventure and longing as he charts one hundred and fifty years in the life and death of an island and its inhabitants—the descendants of Theodosia Burr Alston and those of the freed man whose family would be forever tethered to hers.
It’s a tale of pirates and slaves, treason and treasures, madness and devotion, that takes place on a tiny island battered by storms, infested with mosquitoes, and cut off from the world—as difficult to get to as it is impossible to leave for those who call it home. From Theodosia’s capture at sea to the passionate lives of her great-great-great-granddaughters to the tender story of the black man who cares for them all his days, this is an inspired novel about love, trust, and the often tortuous bonds of family and community.
“ There’s a big-hearted fearlessness in Michael Parker’s work that, quite honestly, I envy.” —Colum McCann, winner of the National Book Award for Let the Great World Spin
Writer Michael Parker is a North Carolinian by birth and by choice. His novels and short stories all reflect the places, textures and language of the state. Michael Parker is the author of four previous novels and two books of short stories. Winner of the Hobson Prize for Distinguished Achievement in Arts and Letters, the North Carolina Award for Literature, and an NEA fellowship, he has been published in the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, and others. He is a professor in the MFA Writing Program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
April 21 at 7:30pm, Creative Writing Students and faculty will read their work at Third Thursday.
Jan 162011
Thursday, January 20th at 7:30pm,
Darrell Laurant plans to speak about the newspaper column as an art form and share a few past columns and excerpts from his book, Even Here.
Mr. Laurant has worked for the News & Advance since 1977, starting out as a sports writer, then sports editor. He began doing a local column in 1981, and has written upwards of 6,000 columns since, along with 1,000 or more feature stories. Laurant has also published four books of collected columns and two non-fiction books — Even Here, about a series of murders in Bedford County in the 1980s, and A City Unto Itself: Lynchburg, VA in the 20th Century.
November 18, 2010
Students from Randolph College read their work. Introductions by Professor Jim Peterson. 
