The UAB Writers' Series is an annual offering of the Creative Writing program. Nationally recognized authors are invited to UAB to give readings and participate in Q-and-A sessions. Readings are free and open to the public. Authors and event details are released before the start of the Fall semester. Previous authors have included Michael Sowder, Margaret Wrinkle, Robert Collins, Sheri Joseph, Kathryn Davis, and Joan McBreen.

The series is co-sponsored by the Department of English, the Honors Program, BACHE Visiting Writers, the Alys Stephens Center, UAB Student Government Association, the Alabama State Council on the Arts, and Friends of the Writing Program.

Visiting Writers Series Presents Robert Collins and Randy Blythe, Retired Professors, UAB Department of English

WHEN: Wednesday October 16, 2024, 6 p.m.

WHERE: AEIVA, 1121 10th Ave S, Biringham, AL 35294

Robert Collins has published poems in various literary magazines, including Ascent, Cimarron Review, Louisville Review, Connecticut Review, Southern Humanities Review, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, Southern Poetry Review, Tar River, and, most recently, The Texas Review and The MacGuffin. He has received two Individual Artists Fellowships from the Alabama State Council on the Arts, been nominated for a Pushcart Prize several times, received the Ascent Award for Poetry, and won the Tennessee Chapbook Prize. He taught American literature and creative writing at the University of Alabama at Birmingham for thirty years where he founded and edited the Birmingham Poetry Review for twenty years and directed the creative writing program for almost a decade. He is the author of eight books of poetry, including Naming the Dead (Future Cycle Press, 2012), Drinking with the Second Shift (World Tech 2017), and, most recently, Dead on Arrival t Dante’s (11thour Press 2023).

Randy Blythe spent many years in Birmingham, his hometown, as a plumber, a drummer, a hippie, a student, an editor, a proofreader, a tutor, and a teacher. He taught at the University of Alabama and at UAB for thirty years, first as an adjunct, then as a graduate teaching assistant, then again as an adjunct, then as an instructor, and finally as an assistant professor in the UAB English department. With Bob Collins, he founded and worked on the Birmingham Poetry Review for 20 years. He now lives, writes, and works on his family’s farm in Etowah county. Published widely for 40 years, he has finally managed to published two full-length collections of poetry, The human Part in 2014 and The Wish Furnace in 2023.