Month: March 2013

The Bowers House and The Georgia Review, the University of Georgia’s nationally renowned journal of arts and letters, are pleased to announce the success of  its October 2010  inaugural event, The Comedy of Survival, featuring South Carolina short-story writer and novelist George Singleton and Georgia-based poet Alice Friman.  The day-long workshop included readings and a question and answer session by Singleton and Friman.  After a lunch break the two writers spent the afternoon focusing on the art of weaving humor into even the most challenging material.

George Singleton is one of the finest and hottest fiction writers in the country at this time – ” a big-hearted evil genius who writes as if he were the love child of Alice Munro and Strom Thurmond,” writes Tony Earley.

A Georgia Review discovery some twenty years ago, Singleton has since published four collections of short stories, two novels, and an irreverent how-to book titled Pep Talks, Warnings, and Screeds: Indispensable Wisdom and Cautionary Advice for Writers. His other titles, which in themselves provide an intriguing introduction to his worldview, include The Half-Mammals of Dixie, Why Dogs Chase Cars, Drowning in Gruel, and Work Shirts for Madmen. A recent recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Singleton has had work published and reprinted in such magazines as the Atlantic Monthly andHarper’s, and in anthologies like New Stories from the South and Surreal South. He lives in Easley, South Carolina.

Alice Friman’s The Book of the Rotten Daughter contains “astonishing poems which fearlessly jump into hell and out again, that resent or forgive,” writes poet Marianne Boruch, “poems which wryly, exactly and so richly honor the world of the living.”  Her eight poetry collections includes The Book of the Rotten Daughter, Zoo, and Inverted Fire; her ninth, Vinculum, is forthcoming from Louisiana State University Press in 2011.

Professor Emerita at the University of Indianapolis, Friman has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Indiana Arts Commission, the Arts Council of Indianapolis, the MacDowell and Yaddo colonies, and the Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest. Like George Singleton a steady contributor to The Georgia Review, Friman is currently poet-in-residence at Georgia College and State University in      Milledgeville.

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