Join us in welcoming Ursinus professor Shane Kowalski as he brings his newest collection of short stories to Big Blue Marble!
Are People Out There is a series of daring, hilarious, and cursed fictions dealing with the usual kinds of people and the lives, or double-lives, they lead: men who steal babies' identities, women who become dogs to rich couples on the weekend, neighbors who build guillotines in their yards all summer, and teenagers who are haunted forever by their school plays, just to name a few. It is the irreducible strangeness of these stories that compels you, the reader, further into these other lives. If you go far enough, you may even recognize your own life amongst them.
Joining Kowalksi is fellow professor and poet Katie Schmid, who will be in conversation with him following the reading. There will also be copies of Are People Out There available for purchase and signing. Come say hi!
Shane Kowalski was born and raised outside of Philadelphia. He is a graduate of Ursinus College (’11), where he studied English and creative writing. He went on to earn an MFA in fiction at Cornell University. His work is published or forthcoming in Conjunctions, Fence, The Iowa Review, Black Warrior Review, EPOCH, Short Story, Long, among other journals. He is the author of the short story collections Small Moods (Future Tense Books) and Are People Out There (Future Tense Books). At Ursinus, Shane instructs on shorter narrative forms, strange and absurdist texts, tenderness and vulnerability in writing, as well as a course called “Nothing Makes Sense.”
Katie Schmid is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing. She’s taught at colleges in Wyoming, Illinois, and Nebraska. Katie first became interested in writing poetry when the poet Li-Young Lee visited her suburban Chicago high school. Her goal in the classroom is to create a lively environment where she can support students’ writing interests and encourage their growing sense of themselves as writers.
Katie, under the writing name Katie Schmid, has been published in Best New Poets, The Nation, and The Gay & Lesbian Review, among other places. She’s a National Endowment for the Arts fellow in poetry and is at work on her second book of poems. Her debut book, Nowhere, about female embodiment, family, and the effects of incarceration, was published by the University of New Mexico Press. She’s also currently at work on a novel.