John Serio, RockBaby, Paul Otremba and Alex Lemon
John Serio, RockBaby, Paul Otremba and Alex Lemon
When: Tuesday October 18th 2011
Where: Northwood University, 1114 West FM 1382, Cedar Hill
WordSpace is proud to partner with Northwood University to present the annual Northwood University Literary Festival, curated by Martha Heimberg.
This year’s dynamic gathering of fiction and poetry writers includes
John Serio and Rock Baby.
John Serio is the editor of the newly released “Selected Poems” by Wallace Stevens. His winning introduction and informative chronology open up these poems, with their human eloquence, to a generation born a hundred years after Stevens. New readers will find that Stevens convinces by manner as well as conscience, by vivacity as well as fidelity, by tragic feeling as well as comic satire. Far more than Eliot or Pound, Stevens wished passionately to be above all a poet of 20th-century America and its American English; and he had the luck, as they did not, to write with increasing genius to the end of his life.
Roderick Goudy, also known as Rock Baby, is a graduate of University of North Texas with a Bachelor’s of Applied Arts and Science with an emphasis in education. In 1993, he began his career as an educator with P.A.C.E. Head Start in Mississippi. In 1999, Roderick began his career as a poet where he has become a nationally known performance poet performing across North America including television appearances.
In 1998, Roderick Goudy began substituting teaching with Dallas Independent School District and from 1999-2002 held the position of PTA President. Roderick began organizing poetry competitions as the City of Dallas Slam Master for Dallas Poetry Slam in 2003. As a Slam Master, he has combined his love for art and education to organize and implement area writing and performance workshops, mentor young artists, guest lecture for community colleges and universities throughout the DFW Metroplex and nationally.
Roderick has served as an art instructor with Junior Players Guild for over 3 years providing instruction in dance, writing, and theatre while addressing issues of bullying, self-esteem, and healthy conflict resolution. He is a frequent guest speaker for area schools addressing bullying, communication and other life skills critical to student success.
Since 1988, he has held positions in the U.S. Army as a communications specialist, a pre-school, after-school and substitute teacher, committee member with WordSpace, a literary non-profit, board member with Family Care Connections, a social service non-profit with emphasis on healthy families and fatherhood initiatives, and Slam Master of Dallas Poetry Slam.
Paul Otremba is the author of the poetry collection The Currency, published by Four Way Books in 2009. His poems and collections have appeared in The Kenyan Review, New England Review, The Washington Post, Poetry Daily, and American Poets in the Twenty First Century: The New Poetics. He has been awarded a Robert Frost Fellowship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, a Barthelme Memorial Fellowship, and a Krakow Poetry Seminar Fellowship. He is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Southern Methodist University.
Alex Lemon was born in Iowa, and lives in Ft. Worth, Texas. He is the author of three collections of poetry, “Mosquito” (Tin House Books), “Hallelujah Blackout” (Milkweed Editions), and “Fancy Beasts” (Milkweed Editions). His writing has appeared in Esquire, The Huffington Post, Best American Poetry 2008, Satellite Convulsions, Tin House, Kenyon Review, AGNI, The Southern Review and jubilat, among others. Among his awards are a 2005 Literature Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts and a 2006 Minnesota Arts Board Grant. He is a frequent book reviewer, edits Descant, the Fort Worth Literary Journal, and teaches at Texas Christian University.
