TIFFANY TRENT

September 21, 6:30 pm
VBI Conference Center

Tiffany Trent is the author of the young adult novels The Unnaturalists (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers) and the Hallowmere series (Mirrorstone/Wizards of the Coast). In 2008, she was awarded a Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators Work-in-Progress Grant and her first book, In the Serpent's Coils, was named a New York Public Library Book of the Teen Age. Her short stories have been published in Magic in the Mirrorstone, Corsets & Clockwork, Willful Impropriety, and Subterranean magazine. She has three Master's degrees in English, Creative Writing, and Environmental Studies and is a former instructor in the Virginia Tech English Department. She has been an author guest at Dragon*Con, World Fantasy Convention, and is a fixture at FaerieCon East. She lives with 60,000 bees, an agoraphobic Labrador Retriever, a cabal of 13 laying hens, and her wildlife biologist husband.

 

MATTHEW VOLLMER

November 13, 2012, 7 pm
VBI Conference Center

Matthew Vollmer is the author of the story collection Future Missionaries of America and the essay collection inscriptions for headstones. He is, with David Shields, the co-editor of Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, "Found" Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous magazines, including Paris Review, Tin House, VQR, Epoch, Ecotone, Colorado Review, The Sun, The Antioch Review, New England Review, and Glimmer Train. He teaches in the English Department at Virginia Tech, where he is Director of Undergraduate Creative Writing.

 

KEVIN ODERMAN

November 28, 2013, 7 pm
VBI Conference Center

Kevin Oderman started his writing life as a literary critic. The Ph.D. kind. He wrote many essays on modern and postmodern poetry and even published a critical book, Ezra Pound and the Erotic Medium. Subsequently, he said no to all that. He wrote poems for the little mags and started writing literary essays, an exercise which led to How Things Fit Together (winner of a Bakeless Prize in nonfiction). He published an expatriate novel, Going. He’s been writing literary nonfiction about travel for years now; at present, he is at work gathering those pieces together into a volume, “Cannot Stay.” Twice he has lived abroad as a Fulbright Fellow. He taught Modern American Poetry as a Senior Lecturer at Aristotle University in Thessaloniki, Greece, and subsequently American literature to M.A. students at Punjab University in Lahore, Pakistan. He is a Professor of English at West Virginia University and teaches in the low rez MA/MFA Program at Wilkes University. His second novel, White Vespa, is slated to appear in November from Etruscan Press.

ERIC FREEZE

February 11, 2013, 7 pm
VBI Conference Center

Eric Freeze is author of Dominant Traits, a collection of short stories set in southern Alberta where he is originally from. Eric Freeze's stories, creative nonfiction, and translations have been published in numerous periodicals including Boston Review, The Southern Review, Harvard Review, New Ohio Review, Tampa Review, and Prairie Fire. He is recipient of a number of awards including a Canada Council for the Arts grant for work on a novel. He teaches creative writing at Wabash College in Indiana, where he lives with his spouse and three children.