Bankhead Visiting Writers Series

Sabrina Orah Mark was raised in Brooklyn, and received a B.A. from Barnard College, an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and a Ph.D. from The University of Georgia. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Letters and Commentary, American Poet, Black Clock, The Canary, Conduit, Denver Quarterly, Forklift, Ohio, Gulf Coast, The Indiana Review, Jubilat, Volt and other journals. Her poems also appear in Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (Sarabande Press) and Best American Poetry 2007 . She has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, ,the Glenn Schaeffer Foundation, and The National Endowment for the Arts. Her first book of poems, The Babies, won the 2004 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize (judged by Jane Miller), and was published by Saturnalia Books. Her essay, “Recording Devices: Mark Levine's Poetics of Evidence,” appears in American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics (Wesleyan University Press). Another essay, "Land of the Weird, Home of the Strange: Fabulism in American Fiction after 1945" is forthcoming in The Writer's Chronicle. Woodland Editions published her chapbook, Walter B.'s Extraordinary Cousin Arrives for a Visit & Other Tales. Her second book, Tsim Tsum, will be published by Saturnalia Books in 2009. She teaches literature and creative writing at Agnes Scott College and The University of Georgia where she is a Park Fellow.

Dave Madden, an assistant professor of English at the University of Alabama, read from “The Authentic Animal,” his book on the history and culture of taxidermy, forthcoming in 2011 from St. Martin’s Press. Kellie Wells, also a UA assistant professor of English, read from her novel “Fat Girl, Terrestrial.” She has won several awards for her works, including the Flannery O’Connor Award and the Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writer’s Award in fiction and has received a Rona Jaffe Prize. The Bankhead Visiting Writers Series brings both emerging and internationally renowned writers to the University of Alabama campus to read from their work.