Join us for a reading from faculty members of Austin Community College’s Creative Writing program. With readings from W. Joe Hoppe, Irwin Tang, Vivé Griffith, Dunya Bean, and John Herndon (left to right, below).
W. Joe Hoppe’s poems have appeared in Analecta, Borderlands, Cider Press Review, Di*Verse*Cities, Nerve Cowboy, Utter, and The Blanton Museum of Art’s Poetry Project. His poems have been anthologized in Stand Up Poetry, How to be This Man, gumballpoetry.com, and Beatest State in the Union. Joe’s one-of-a-kind poetry video, “$5200 MSTA,” has been shown at the Dallas Video Festival, San Antonio Underground Film Festival, Austin Film Festival, and VideoEx in Zurich, Switzerland. His books include a collection of short stories, Harmon Place (1991) from Primal Press, a poetry collection, Galvanized (2007), from Dalton Publishing, and a second poetry collection, Diamond Plate (2012), from Obsolete Press. Hoppe is the Poet Lariat of Austin’s intellectual variety show The Dionysium. He has hosted numerous poetry events at Austin’s Malvern Books, including interviews of local poets, a reading and discussion of Emily Dickinson, a communal performance of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl celebrating its 60th anniversary, and an annual memorial reading for the late, great Austin poet Albert Huffstickler. He is currently finishing up a four-year effort to get a customized ’51 Plymouth Cranbrook roadworthy for a trip down Route 66 in the summer of 2017. Hoppe is an Associate Professor in English and Creative Writing at Austin Community College in Austin, Texas.
Irwin Tang is a writer and activist. He is the principal author of Asian Texans: Our Histories and Our Lives and co-author of When Invisible Children Sing: a true story of five street children, an idealistic young doctor, and their dangerous hope. He is currently working on a documentary about how the goats are trouncing the sheep in Jesus’s war on hunger.
Vivé Griffith is a poet and essayist whose work has appeared in The Sun, Oxford American, Gettysburg Review, and the Washington Post. She moved to Austin in 1999 and is a graduate of the Michener Center for Writers. Since 2007 she has directed Free Minds, a program offering free college humanities classes to adults who have faced barriers to education. She teaches poetry workshops in the community to anyone who asks.
Currently an adjunct professor of creative writing at Austin Community College, Dunya Bean received the master of fine arts from The University of Texas at El Paso—on the border, la frontera—between Texas and Mexico. Her thesis and novel about two sisters divided by the 1956 Hungarian Revolution got a second place and a trip to receive the Robie McCauley Prize at Castle Weil in the Netherlands. A stint as a writer-in-residence at the Ucross Foundation’s Clearmont, Wyoming location led to her current novel, Preacher Man, using Walter Prescott Webb’s book The Great Plains that divides the country at the 38th meridian and In Preacher Man, how morality plays out during drought, sin among ranchers, farmers and others in West Texas. Short stories have landed in anthologies, magazines, and literary journals; and Bean’s short video, “Looking for the Light, Listening for the Sound,” showed at SXSW in March, 2012.
John Herndon is a poet, novelist and screenwriter. He has published seven books of poetry, and his first novel, One Too Many, was published in 2016. His first feature film as writer and producer, Frame Switch, is currently available on Amazon, and his screenplay has been nominated for Best Original Screenplay for a Feature Film at international film festivals in Berlin and Milan. He teaches writing and literature at Austin Community College.