Sue Hart Memorial Reading and Lecture Series

Reading, September 19, LA 205, 6:30 pm

CMarie Fuhrman is a poet and author whose work is inspired by the Western landscape. She is the author of the poetry chapbook Camped Beneath the Dam, as well as the co-editor of two significant anthologies, Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, and Poetry and Native Voices: Indigenous Poetry, Craft, and Conversations. She has poetry and nonfiction published or forthcoming in a variety of publications, including Terrain.org, Emergence Magazine, Platform Review, Northwest Review, Yellow Medicine Review, Poetry Northwest, and various anthologies. CMarie is the director of the Elk River Writers Workshop and a regular columnist for the Inlander. She is the Associate Director and Poetry Director for Western Colorado University's Graduate Program in Creative Writing, where she teaches Nature Writing. CMarie is the host of Terra Firma, a Colorado Public Radio program. She is a former Idaho Writer in Residence and lives in the Salmon River Mountains of Idaho. 

Reading, October 3, LA 205, 6:30 pm

Róisín Kelly is an Irish writer who was born in West Belfast and raised in the rural county of Leitrim, just south of the border with Northern Ireland. After a year as a handweaver on a remote island in Mayo and a Masters in Writing at National University of Ireland, Galway, she now calls Cork City home. Her first collection of poetry, Mercy, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2020. She is currently writing a second collection of poetry and a novel.

Lecture: Shakespeare's Last Best Place, October 16, LA 205, 6:30 pm

Where does Shakespeare belong? In the theatre? The classroom? In England? America? The playwright himself was caught between his rural village of Stratford and the bustling capital of London, while many of the plays are set in foreign lands that he never visited. In these settings, the characters often face exile or banishment, which prompts reflections that “There is a world elsewhere.”

This lecture traces Shakespeare’s sojourns in a place that he never even imagined: Montana. From the first moment that mountain men carried books to the Rocky Mountain West, Shakespeare was part of the story. Shakespeare’s works made themselves at home with pioneers and miners, with suffragette women and educators, with performers in opera houses and parks.

The story of Montana’s love affair with the famous English writer reflects upon our diverse histories, showing how Shakespeare has given Montanans the language and the art to reflect upon their own sense of place.

Dr. Gretchen Minton is Professor of English and College of Letters and Science Distinguished Professor at Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana. She has published extensively on Shakespeare and his contemporaries, including several critical editions of early modern plays, including Timon of Athens, Twelfth Night, and The Revenger’s Tragedy. Her 2020 monograph, Shakespeare in Montana: Big Sky Country’s Love Affair with the World’s Most Famous Author, is the winner of several regional book awards.

In addition to her scholarly work, Minton is a dramaturg, script adaptor, and director. She is the dramaturg for Montana Shakespeare in the Parks and the co-founder of Montana InSite Theatre, which

is dedicated to site-specific performances that use classical texts to address current environmental issues.

In 2023 she was a Fulbright Scholar hosted by James Cook University in Townsville, Australia, where she wrote and staged an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night that is set in North Queensland and speaks to the intertwined human and ecological histories of this region.

Reading, November 1, LA 205, 6:30 pm

Leigh Ann Ruggiero is an award-winning novelist, playwright, and Assistant Professor of English at MSU Billings. Her debut novel Unfollowers won the Juniper Prize for Fiction in 2021. It went on to win the National Indie Excellence Award for Multicultural Fiction and the Foreword INDIES Silver Award for Literary Fiction; it was also a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award. Leigh Ann's short play Tetrachromacy was selected for the Last Chance New Play Fest in Helena, to be performed in November of this year.

For more information contact: Tami Haaland, Montana State University Billings, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences at 406-657-2948 or email thaaland@msubillings.edu.

See also:

MSU Billings sponsors Sue Hart Memorial Reading & Lecture Series