PRESS RELEASE
UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL ARKANSAS
COLLEGE OF FINE ARTS AND COMMUNICATION
CONTACT: Mark Spitzer, (501) 450-3339; mspitzer@uca.edu
TWO UCA STUDENTS TO DEBUT BOOKS AT LAUNCH EVENT
UCA Department of Writing
CONWAY ― The local small press Shakespeare and Company, Toad Suck will sponsor a reading/book-signing by two University of Central Arkansas students from the present and recent past at 8 p.m. on Friday, March 1, in the Black Box Gallery on the UCA campus.
This event is free and open to the public and is appropriate for all ages.
Timothy Snediker, author of Kerplunk the Moon (just published by Shakespeare and Co., Toad Suck), is currently a Creative Writing and Religious Studies major at UCA. Snediker’s collection of avant-garde poetry is described as “Oscillating from lunacy to sanity and back again . . . a certain madness and a certain insolvency orbit the molten core of this red-hot debut collection.”
Andrew Mobbs, who earned his BA in Writing at UCA and just returned from the Peace Corps in Mongolia, recently co-founded the new online literary journal Nude Bruce Review (nudebrucereview.com) with Snediker. Strangers and Pilgrims (published by Six Gallery Press, Pittsburgh) employs the voice of “an everyman [who] wanders the terrain like an introspective Odysseus hellbent on imaging the machinery of transcience.”
Publisher Mark Spitzer said: “These two poets have unique, innovative, highly literary voices. They’ve been influenced by Frank Stanford, the great state of Arkansas and a piercing command of language and imagination. I’m proud to publish Tim’s book and I was glad to help Andrew out. The publisher of Six Gallery Press asked me if I knew of any hot young poets, so I pointed him to Strangers and Pilgrims and offered to lay it out. These works complement each other―both stylistically and in subject matter―and are representative of an incredibly lively and sophisticated poetics honed here in Arkansas.”
Shakespeare and Company, Toad Suck published The Runaway Note by Hendrix professor Tyrone Jaeger in 2012, and Surreal Killer by Roy Trask (aka, the late David Arnot) in 2011. These books have a similar postmodern aesthetic that Kerplunk the Moon colorfully continues ― along with its sister publication, Strangers and Pilgrims. These books are available at Hastings Books and Music in Conway and on Amazon.com.
Copies of Kerplunk and Strangers will be on sale for $5 each at the Black Box Gallery in Schichtl Hall on the UCA campus on Friday, March 1, from 8-9 p.m. The authors will read selections from their works, hold a brief Q&A session and sign copies. For more information, contact Spitzer at mspitzer@uca.edu or (501) 450-3339.
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