American Literary Review Student Reading

Please join us for the second reading in the ALR series on Friday October 12th at at 7:30pm. We proudly welcome PhD candidates Caitlin Cowan (poetry), Justin Bigos (poetry), Erin Stalcup (fiction), and Sidney Thompson (fiction). All students and faculty are invited to attend, and of course, please feel free to bring friends and significant others. 

Caitlin Cowan’s poetry has appeared in Catch Up, Fugue, The L Magazine, Fawlt Magazine, Crate, and The Offbeat. She is a graduate of The University of Michigan, where she won an Avery Hopwood Award in 2006. Her poem, “Flight Plan,” was selected by Ilya Kaminsky to win the Ron McFarland Prize for Poetry in 2010. In 2011, her Twitter poem aired on NPR’s “Tell Me More” with Michele Martin for National Poetry Month. She is currently a doctoral candidate and teaching fellow at the University of North Texas where she serves as president of the Graduate Students in English Association, and is also well-known for having the cutest cat in Denton.

Justin Bigos holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College, and is currently a second-year PhD candidate in English and Creative Writing at UNT, where he serves as Interviews Editor for the American Literary Review.  His poems have appeared in magazines including Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, Indiana Review, Crazyhorse, and The Collagist. 

Erin Stalcup's stories are forthcoming in Freight Stories and H_NGM_N, and have appeared in in The Kenyon Review, Kenyon Review Online, The Sun, [PANK], Puerto del Sol, and elsewhere. Her first collection, Gravity: Stories & a Novella might finally be done, so she'll spend this semester working on her first novel, as well as writing creative nonfiction, two things she doesn't really know how to do. She's counting on most people in the room to help her out.  

Sidney Thompson is the author of the short story collection Sideshow, which was awarded Foreword Magazine's Silver Award for Best Story Collection of 2006.  His stories have appeared in such literary journals as The Southern Review and The Carolina Quarterly, and four have been reprinted in anthologies of Southern fiction.  A series of poems about his wife's recent pregnancy is forthcoming in RHINO Poetry and The Fertile Source.