Everyone, join us for the Vermillion Literary Project Poetry Slam, featuring award-winning, professional writer Lee Ann Roripaugh, on Thursday, July 28, at 7 p.m., at the Coffee Shop Gallery, 24 W. Main Street, downtown Vermillion. Prizes will be awarded to the slam winners. Slam poets should bring at least three poems. For more information about VLP poetry slams, visit http://www.usd.edu/~projlit/vlpslam.cfm .

Lee Ann Roripaugh's second volume of poetry, YEAR OF THE SNAKE, was published by Southern Illinois University Press as part of the Crab Orchard Award Series in Poetry. Her first volume of poetry, BEYOND HEART MOUNTAIN (Penguin Books, 1999), was a 1998 winner of the National Poetry Series, and was selected as a finalist for the 2000 Asian American Literary Awards. The recipient of a 2003 Archibald Bush Foundation Individual Artist Fellowship, she was also named the 2004 winner of the Prairie Schooner Strousse Award, the 2001 winner of the Frederick Manfred Award for Best Creative Writing awarded by the Western Literature Association, the 1995 winner of the Randall Jarrell International Poetry Prize, as well as the winner of an AWP Intro Award and an Academy of American Poets Prize.

A native of Laramie, Wyoming, she received an M.F.A. in creative writing from Indiana University. Other degrees include an M.M. in music history from Indiana University and a B.M. in piano performance from Indiana University. Her poetry and fiction have appeared or will be forthcoming in journals such as PLOUGHSHARES, SHENANDOAH, MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW, PARNASSUS: POETRY IN REVIEW, NEW ENGLAND REVIEW, NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW, ALASKA QUARTERLY REVIEW, RIVER STYX, and CRAB ORCHARD REVIEW, among others. Her poetry has also been selected for inclusion in the following anthologies: ASIAN AMERICAN POETRY: THE NEXT GENERATION (University of Illinois Press), POETS OF THE NEW CENTURY (Godine), AMERICAN POETRY: THE NEXT GENERATION (Carnegie Mellon Press), WOVEN ON THE WIND (Houghton Mifflin), AMERICAN IDENTITIES: CONTEMPORARY MULTICULTURAL VOICES (University of New England Press), and WALTZING ON WATER: POETRY BY WOMEN (Dell). Ms. Roripaugh is currently an Associate Professor of English at the University of South Dakota.

For more information about this event and/or the Vermillion Literary Project, visit http://www.usd.edu/~projlit or call 605-677-5229.
posted by Michelle Rogge Gannon at 1:39 PM