“A Reading by Erin McGraw and Gregory Donovan”

Erin McGraw is the author of six books of fiction, most recently Better Food for a Better World: A Novel (Slant, 2013). Her stories and essays have appeared in The Southern Review , The Atlantic Monthly , The Kenyon Review , and other journals and magazines. Photo by Jo McCulty, 2012

Gregory Donovan is the author of the poetry collections Torn from the Sun (Red Hen Press, 2015), long-listed for the Julie Suk Award, and Calling His Children Home (University of Missouri Press, 1993), which won the Devins Award for Poetry. His poetry, essays, translations, and fiction have been published in The Kenyon Review , The Southern Review , New England Review , TriQuarterly , diode , Crazyhorse , Gulf Coast , Copper Nickel , and many other journals. His work has also appeared in several anthologies, including Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets of Virginia (University of Virginia Press, 2003). Among other awards for his writing, he is the recipient of the Robert Penn Warren Award from New England Writers as well as grants from the Virginia Commission for the Arts and fellowships from the Ucross Foundation and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Donovan has served as a visiting writer and guest faculty for a number of summer conferences and low-residency programs, such as the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Chautauqua Institution Writers’ Center, the River Pretty Writers Retreat, the VCFA Postgraduate Writers’ Conference, and the University of Tampa MFA program. With the writer/director Michele Poulos, he is a producer of A Late Style of Fire , the feature-length documentary on the life and work of the late Larry Levis. Donovan is a founding faculty member of Virginia Commonwealth University’s graduate creative writing program. He is a senior editor at Blackbird . Photo by Michele Poulos