The Visiting Writers Series presented by the UMF Creative Writing program will welcome fiction writer Jensen Beach as the program’s third reader of the season at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 16, in The Landing in the UMF Olsen Student Center at the University of Maine at Farmington. The reading is free and open to the public and will be followed by a book signing with the author.

Beach’s latest collection, “Swallowed by the Cold,” is a linked collection about fragmented grief, personal and political disasters, and the haunting honesty characters feel comfortable sharing with strangers, while approaching their loved ones with distance and coldness. It is a recipient of the 2017 Vermont Book Award.

A Paris Review staff pick, reviewer Daniel Johnson states, “‘Swallowed by the Cold’ empathizes with the way we get too caught up in our own messes to notice when our fellow man is, however figuratively, bleeding out alone on a beach.” Brandon Taylor of Electric Literature writes, “Jensen Beach moves deftly in and around all of his characters’ lives, often revealing with stark and startling clarity all the absurdity and beauty present in even the most mundane of daily rhythms.”

Beach’s work has appeared in A Public Space, the Paris Review, and The New Yorker among others. He is the fiction editor of the lauded literary journal Green Mountain Review and teaches in the Creative Writing B.F.A. program at Northern Vermont University at Johnson. He holds an M.F.A. from the Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and an M.A. and B.A. in English from Stockholm University.

“Swallowed by the Cold” is available for pre-purchase at the UMF University Store and Devany, Doak, and Garret Booksellers.

The UMF Creative Writing program invites students to work with faculty, who are practicing writers, in workshop-style classes to discover and develop their writing strengths in the genres of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. Small classes, an emphasis on individual conferencing, and the development of a writing portfolio allow students to see themselves as artists and refine their writing under the guidance of accomplished and published faculty mentors. Students can pursue internships to gain real-world writing and publishing experience by working on campus with The Sandy River Review, a student-run literary magazine; Ripple Zine, a feminist magazine; and The Farmington Flyer, a university newspaper.

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