ALUMNI READING

Poet
Steve Gehrke

Nonfiction writer
Nicole Lea Helget

Fiction and nonfiction writer
Mike Magnuson

Thursday, September 29, 2005

Talk on craft
3:00 P.M. (Gehrke and Magnuson)—CSU Ostrander Auditorium
Reading
7:30 P.M.—CSU Ostrander Auditorium

STEVE GEHRKE’S second book, The Pyramids of Malpighi, won the Philip Levine Prize and was published by Anhinga Press. His first book, The Resurrection Machine, won the John Ciardi Prize. New poems are forthcoming at The Yale Review, Slate, The Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review and Virginia Quarterly Review. Currently, he’s a PhD student at The University of Missouri, Columbia.

NICOLE LEA HELGET studies and works at Minnesota State University, Mankato. Her book, The Summer of Ordinary Ways, published by Borealis Books, comes out in October 2005. She is the recipient of the Robert Wright Award and the Loft Speakeasy Prize for Prose. She is currently working on a novel set in Minnesota during World War I. She lives in North Mankato with her boyfriend and editor, Nate LeBoutillier, and her three children, Isabella, Mitch, and Pip.

MIKE MAGNUSON is the author of two novels, The Right Man for the Job and The Fire Gospels, and an autobiography entitled Lummox. He received his MA in creative writing from Minnesota State University, Mankato, then went on to get his MFA in fiction writing from the University of Florida, where he studied with Padgett Powell. Not that long ago, starting as a self-described lummox with a bicycle, he lost seventy-five pounds in the space of three months, quit smoking, stopped drinking, and morphed from the big guy at the back of the pack into a lean, mean cycling machine. Today, Mike is a 175-pound athlete competing in some of the most difficult one-day racing events in America. His memoir, Heft on Wheels, charts every detail of his transformation, from the horrors of skin-tight XXL biking shorts to the miseries of nicotine withdrawal.

Listen to an interview with Steve Gehrke and Mike Magnuson.

This year's Good Thunder Reading Series is funded by the Minnesota State University Department of English, the MSU College of Arts and Humanities, the MSU Office of Institutional Diversity, MSU Library Services, the Eddice B. Barber Visiting Writer Endowment, the Robert C. Wright Endowment, and individual donors. This activity is made possible in part by a grant provided by the Prairie Lakes Regional Arts Council from funds appropriated by the Minnesota State Legislature. This activity is also made possible in part by a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, through an appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.