Carmen Gimenez Smith
By Emma Fodor
Office of University Marketing and Communications
The University of Central Arkansas College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences (CAHSS) will host poet and professor Carmen Gimenez Smith as an artist-in-residence Nov. 5-6. All events will be conducted on Zoom.
Gimenez Smith’s visit is also a part of the C. D. Wright Women Writers Conference, which is designed to recognize, promote and encourage women-identifying writers. The conference gives opportunities to UCA students such as free admission and hands-on learning from the keynote speakers.
On Nov. 5 at 7 p.m., Gimenez Smith will hold a public reading and Q&A that will take place via Zoom (Meeting ID: 985 5888 9521 and Passcode: 533830). The event will also be livestreamed to the CAHSS Facebook page, Facebook.com/CAHSSUCA. On Nov. 6 at 11 a.m., she will present a craft talk with creative writing students, and at 3:30 p.m., she will lead a discussion with the editors of the online literary journal “Arkana.” During her final event at 4 p.m., Gimenez Smith will lead a master class with Master of Fine Arts creative writing students. All Nov. 6 events will take place via Zoom and are open to all UCA students.
“Bringing Gimenez Smith to campus will benefit the UCA community because of the wide range of roles she fills in the literary world,” said Sandy Longhorn, C.D. Wright Women Writers Conference director and associate professor of creative writing. “As a poet, she is a model of a writer responding directly to the political and social tensions of our time from a marginalized viewpoint.”
Gimenez Smith is a professor of English at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Virginia. She is also the co-director for CantoMundo, an American literary organization that supports Latino/a poets and poetry. Her latest book of poetry, “Be Recorder,” was published in fall 2019.
The artist-in-residence program is funded by UCA’s arts fee and is administered by the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences. For more information about the program, call the Office of the CAHSS Dean at (501) 450-3293 or email iragni1@uca.edu.
