Stony Brook Southampton Debuts New 'Southampton Review'

The summer 2012 edition of The Southampton Review, from the 's MFA in Creative Writing and Literature program, will be unveiled Friday at a with readings by two-time U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins and award-winning essayist, novelist and distinguished professor Roger Rosenblatt.

Collins and Rosenblatt both contributed to the literary review, which includes fiction, non-fiction, plays, screenplays, poetry, literary cartoons, photography and art. The Southampton Review is open to submissions from all around the globe, and from both emerging and established writers and artists.

Collins regularly leads summer poetry workshops at Stony Brook Southampton and Rosenblatt is a distinguished professor of writing at the campus, teaching classes in Southampton and Manhattan, according to the MFA website.

The new edition of TSR includes an excerpt from Rosenblatt’s forthcoming memoir, and five of Collins’ original poems.

This edition features a special insert with photographs and writing from the MFA program’s January 2012 winter conference at Stony Brook University’s Turkana Basin Institute in Kenya.

"TSR is all about visual art and written language," Editor-in-Chief Lou Ann Walker said. "And since Richard Leakey had been talking about the origins of language while MFA in Creative Writing Director Julie Sheehan was leading a poetry workshop at the institute in January, we decided to do a special insert."

Workshop co-leader Bob Holman, the founder of the Bowery Poetry Club and self-described poetry activist, contributed a poem to the insert, on what it is like to write poetry in a place like Turkana, against the backdrop of Leakey talking about his ideas on evolution based on the many fossils he has found there.

Walker said the new TSR boasts a 10 percent increase in the number of contributors over the last issue.

Some notable written contributions Walker pointed out are novelist Ursula Hegi’s three poems on Alaska, Jen Senft’s short story “Prison Visit,” Albert Abonado’s poems “Three Colophons,” Ginny Rosenblatt’s poem “March 20,” and a memoir by Mitchell Kriegman titled “The Crooked People in the Crazy House.”

In the visual arts, Walker noted photos of swimmers by Francine Fleischer of Sag Harbor, Massachusetts artist Paul Chojnowski’s nudes made with a blow torch on paper and wood, and three "extremely detailed paintings" from a series titled Tuning Fields” by Margaret Garrett of Shelter Island. Diana Frank of Bridgehampton contributed her photographs of water that Walker said "have been blown up on giant pieces of Plexiglass."

New Yorker cartoonists Michael Maslin and Liza Donnelly contributed two works each.

The gala will be at 7:30 p.m. at the campus’ the Avram Theater, open to the public.

Earlier in the day, at 2 p.m., there will be an information session on the MFA in Creative Writing and Literature program in Duke Lecture Hall in the Chancellors Hall building, followed by readings by contributors to new edition of The Southampton Review.

For more information on the gala or to register, visit www.stonybrook.edu/avram. For more information about The Southampton Review, call 631-632-5030 or email TheSouthamptonReview@stonybrook.edu.