Valley Voices

A series of regional writers responding to the people and landscapes of California’s Great Central Valley

Elizabeth Hatmaker teaches courses in creative writing, cultural studies, film, ethnography, and urban education at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois. She also serves as faculty advisor for Euphemism, Illinois State’s on-line creative arts journal.

Elizabeth will visit Stanislaus on Monday, November 8^th and will read from her work in the reading room of the library. The reading will start at 1:00 and last for approximately one hour. This event is free and open to the public. It is Sponsored by Sigma Tau Delta, the University Library, and the Department of English.

Elizabeth Hatmaker’s book Girl in Two Pieces (BlazeVOX 2010) details the unsolved 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short a.k.a. “The Black Dahlia.” The collection of poems, fragments, and essays revamps the various modes and rhetorical questions of the true crime genre to visit what Edgar Allen Poe claimed to be the most “poetical” of topics—the death of a beautiful woman. Her current project—“OST,” details the sound and narrative anti-aesthetics in 1970s exploitation films. In a set of fragmented synopses and reviews, she attempts to reconstruct and liberate the abject female subjects (and viewers) of “bad” films remembered mainly for confusing plots, pedestrian visual style, and mangled soundtracks. An early piece from this project is featured in Brian Pera and Masha Tupitsyn’s collection Life As We Show It: Writing on Film. Hatmaker’s creative work is also featured in Bird Dog, Mississippi Review, MiPOesias, Mandorla, Mirage/ Periodical. Her work on pedagogy in featured in Language and Learning Across the Disciplines and Social Epistemology. She has work forthcoming on the post-war fiction of Cornell Woolrich, Dorothy Hughes, and Patricia Highsmith.

Past Speakers:


Jon Veinberg	Dixie Salazar	Gary Soto	Gerald Haslam	Sam Pereira	George “Elfie” Ballis	Ed Decker

Lee Herrick	Juan Felipe Herrera	Glover Davis

Valley Voices is a visiting writers program sponsored by the English Department at California State University, Stanislaus. The series grows out of a desire to expose the students and surrounding community of CSU Stanislaus to the rich tradition of writers who live in or have been inspired by the San Joaquin Valley, though we are interested in writers and artists around the country whose work has a regional focus. Tony Perrello, Stephanie Paterson, Andrew Dorsey, and Susan Marshall coordinate the program, so feel free to contact any of them with suggestions or comments, or click here to leave us a message.