Literary Lecture Series
The Writing Program's Literary Lecture Series is designed to help you take advantage of University culture, to step beyond the classroom into the activities of campus life. Each spring several sections of English 102 participate in the Literary Lecture Series. If enrolled in this series, you will read the work of visiting authors. Three or four times during the semester, you will attend readings, plays, and/or art exhibits. At these events, you will have the opportunity to meet the authors and to ask them questions about both their work and your own. While focusing on contemporary issues, local as well as national, the series will introduce students to different genres and different writing contexts. Students can showcase their own writing at a conference held late in March. Sections participating in the Literary Lecture Series have the same course objectives as non-participating sections of English 102. Requirements for major assignments will be similar across the sections, and overall workload will be comparable. Class will be cancelled for each required outside event, so sections participating in the Literary Lecture Series will not require more of your time than other English 102 sections. To ensure your attendance and participation in outside events, you will be required to turn in a significant writing (at least one typed page), either at the event itself, or in response to the event. These writings will be graded, counting as minor assignments (very heavily weighted) or short writings. The Spring 2002 Series The Spring 2002 series will spotlight three writers, Bobbie Ann Mason, Zohreh Sullivan, and Rhonda Reeves, and one filmmaker, Erin McGinnis. 
Bobbie Ann Mason gained national prominence by writing about the lives of ordinary Western Kentuckians. Born on a dairy farm near Mayfield, Kentucky, Mason received a journalism degree from UK and worked briefly in publishing and in magazine writing in New York before getting her Ph.D. in English. She was propelled onto a national scene with her book Shiloh and Other Stories (1982), which won the Hemingway Foundation Award and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pen/Faulkner Award. Her first novel In Country (1985), about a woman's attempt to understand her father's death in Vietnam, was turned into a movie starring Bruce Willis and Emily Lloyd. In addition to fiction, Mason has written a critical assessment of adolescent detective fiction. Mason's most recent work, Clear Springs: A Memoir, is a loving and unsentimental account of her childhood in rural Kentucky. 
Zohreh Sullivan's Exiled Memories: Stories of Iranian Diaspora records the voices of Iranian émigrés who came to the United States after the Tehranian revolution of 1979 This beautiful work of ethnography captures the voices of people making a difficult cultural adjustment, thereby chronicling the impact of this transition on personal identity. Sullivan is an English Professor at the University of Illinois where she has received numerous teaching awards. She specializes in Modem British Literature and Postcolonial Studies and is the author of a critical work on Rudyard Kipling as well as several scholarly articles. Rhonda Reeves, editor/publisher/owner of Lexington's on Ace Magazine, is something of a local personality. She began writing for Ace Magazine in the early 90s, and her popular column, "Reality Truck," has been in a staple of Ace for the last eight years. Ace, a free weekly with a solid tradition of progressive politics, can be found in the W.T. Young library foyer as well as several locations across town. Reeves has a master's degree in English from UK, specializing in the Southern Literary Renaissance. In addition to her work at Ace Magazine, Reeves teaches part time at UK. Erin Isabel McGinnis, cofounder of Cafe Sisters Production, is a well-known documentary filmmaker whose work appears regularly on PBS. Her credits include Tobacco Blues (1998), a documentary about small tobacco farmers in Kentucky and The Girl Next Door (1999), a compelling study of the life of porn star Stacy Valentine that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. McGinnis holds a BA in Cultural and Feminist Anthropology from San Diego State University and a certificate in Film and Video Theory and Production from University College of Dublin. She is currently producing a documentary titled Beyond the Border which studies the personal effects of Mexican-US migration by tracking one family torn asunder when its sons move to Kentucky for work in the lucrative horse and tobacco industries. Student EssaysCollected here are some essays by University of Kentucky students in the pilot sections of the Literary Lecture Series. All have been edited. Special thanks to the following authors for allowing the University of Kentucky Writing Program to publish their work on the web. (Essays will open in a new window.)
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