Craft Talks

Victor Wang grew up in Northern China. Shortly after being sent to a Maoist “agricultural reeducation camp” for more than two years, he returned to Chinese society graduating with a BFA from The Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts, one of three top art institutes in China. After graduation, Mr. Wang taught there for four and a half years and was sent to the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana as a visiting scholar.  He earned his MFA at Fontbonne University. Mr. Wang has exhibited widely across the country as well as internationally, and has won various awards for excellence, including awards for both painting and art instruction.  He is also the author of two books, Memoir of a Sunflower and Three Major Techniques of Oil Painting. Victor Wang currently lives in St. Louis, where he teaches painting, drawing and graduate critique classes as a full professor at Fontbonne University.

Craft Talks: Part of the St. Louis Literary Award Programs at Saint Louis University

Rachel Greenwald Smith is a scholar and storyteller who seamlessly connects topics ranging from poetry to governing systems, punk music, economics, aesthetic innovations in the art and culture, motherhood, social unrest, and more. This interview delves into her new book, On Compromise: Art, Politics, and the Fate of an America Idea, as well as Ms. Greenwald Smith's literary (and musical) influences, writing habits, and the craft of research and composition. 

Rachel Greenwald Smith is the author of On Compromise: Art, Politics, and the Fate of an American Ideal (Graywolf Press, 2021) and Affect and American Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism (Cambridge University Press, 2015). She is an Associate Professor of English at Saint Louis University, where she teaches courses at the graduate and undergraduate level on contemporary literature and critical theory.  Her essays have appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Yale Review. Her academic articles have appeared in Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Post45 Peer Reviewed, American Literature, Mediations, Modern Fiction Studies, and elsewhere. She has edited two volumes of scholarship, Neoliberalism and Contemporary Literary Culture, with Mitchum Huehls (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), and American Literature in Transition: 2000-2010 (Cambridge University Press, 2017). She is the recipient of an American Council of Learned Societies Ryskamp Fellowship (2015).

Originally from Portland, Oregon, she lives in Saint Louis.

Howard Schwartz is a prolific writer who has published fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. He is widely considered among the top Jewish folklorists in the world. In searching for themes and images for his work in various genres, Professor Schwartz has often found his inspiration in biblical, midrashic, and kabbalistic lore. Many of his works retell ancient folktales, reflecting his belief in the importance of passing cultural lore from one generation to the next. His poetry frequently reflects the dreamlike and mysterious elements of Jewish mythology. Schwartz’s fictional works, as typified in the collection of parables titled The Captive Soul of the Messiah, “are in part original, in part recreations of ancient legends, a conjunction of personal search and dreaming with mythical or timeless patterns or cycles,” reported Francis Landy in the Jewish Quarterly. As a result, Landy explained, Schwartz’s stories “are at once familiar, filled with the aura of the sages, giving the impression of a blind and insatiable predilection for the alleyways of tradition, and at the same time being wholly pertinent, incisive metaphors for our own predicament.” Howard Schwartz is Professor Emeritus in the English department at the University of Missouri, St. Louis.

We cover a lot of ground with writer/professor, Ethan Rutherford, soon after the release of his second collection of short fiction, Farthest South, published by A Strange Object. Ethan Rutherford’s fiction has appeared in BOMB, Tin House, Ploughshares, One Story, American Short Fiction, Post Road, Esopus, Conjunctions, and The Best American Short Stories.  His first book, The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, a finalist for the John Leonard Award, received honorable mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award, was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and was the winner of a Minnesota Book Award.  Born in Seattle, Washington, he received his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Minnesota and now teaches Creative Writing at Trinity College.  He lives in Hartford, Connecticut with his wife and two children.

Originally from San Diego, California, Kahlil Robert Irving is an artist currently living and working in the USA. He attended the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Art, Washington University in St. Louis (MFA Fellow, 2017); and the Kansas City Art Institute (BFA, Art History and Ceramics/Sculpture, 2015). His work has been exhibited at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas; the Arizona State University Art Museum, Phoenix; and the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Rhode Island, among others.

Kahlil Irving was selected to participate in the 2020 Great Rivers Biennial hosted by the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, where he is exhibiting a solo exhibition entitled “At Dusk” on view from September 11th, 2020 to February 21st, 2021. Recently, he was awarded the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant for Painters and Sculptors. In 2018, Kahlil Irving’s first institutional solo exhibition took place at Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts, Connecticut, and was accompanied by a full-color catalogue with essays and an interview. Currently, he is presenting a large-scale commission on the project wall at the Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati, Ohio. Mr. Irving's work is also featured in two concurrent collection exhibitions Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950–2019 and Nothing is so Humble: Prints from Everyday Objects at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Kahlil Irving's work is in the collections of J.P Morgan Chase Art Collection, New York; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. He is also one of the new 30 featured artists in Forbes Magazine’s annual 30 Under 30: Art & Style showcasing 30 groundbreaking cultural figures in the arts all under 30-years-old.

Photo Credit of Kahlil Irving: David Johnson

David Keplinger is a Professor of Literature in the MFA Program at American University in Washington, D.C. He is the author of seven collections of poetry, including The Long Answer (2020) published by Stephen F. Austin State University Press, and The World to Come (Conduit Books and Ephemera, 2021), a collection of prose poems which has won the 2020 Minds on Fire Prize. David has been awarded many literary honors over the years for his works including the UNT Rilke Prize, the Colorado Book Award, the Cavafy Prize from Poetry International, the Erskine Prize from Smartish Pace; Poet Mary Oliver awarded David the T.S. Elliot Prize for his book of poetry, The Rose Inside. David Keplinger has received two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2011 he produced By and By, an album of eleven songs based on the poetry of his great-great grandfather, a Civil War veteran. He performed and presented on the project at the National Portrait Gallery’s Donald W. Reynolds Center in 2013. Mr. Keplinger’s work has been included in numerous anthologies in the United States as well as in China and Northern Ireland, and he has taught at the universities of Ostrava (Czech Republic) and Kosice (Slovakia) as well as co-founding and teaching in the summer creative writing institute at John Cabot University in Rome (2015-2016).

Ted Mathys is an assistant professor of Creative Writing in the English Department at Saint Louis University. He is recently named president of the prestigious and venerable St. Louis Poetry Center, which was created in 1946. Mr. Mathys is also the curator for the 100 Boots Poetry Series at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation. Ted Mathys is the author of  Gold Cure (Coffee House Press, 2020) as well as Null Set (2015), The Spoils (2009) and Forge (2005). He is the recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts St. Louis Regional Arts Commission. Ted Mathys was selected by Alice Notley for the Poetry Society of America's Cecil Hemley Memorial Award, and his poetry and criticism have appeared in American Poetry Review, BOMB, Boston Review, Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, jubilat, Fence, The Georgia Review, PBS NewsHour and other publications. Originally from Ohio, Mr. Mathys holds an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he received the John C. Schupes Fellowship for Excellence in Poetry; and an MA in international environmental policy from Tuft's University.

Jeanette Batz Cooperman is one of the most recognizable names in Missouri journalism, a veritable institution in the field. She is a 2020 inductee into the St. Louis Media Hall of Fame and was named to the FOLIO:100 list of the “best and brightest” in the magazine industry nationwide. The award-winning Batz-Cooperman was previously an editor and staff writer for St. Louis Magazine for twelve years. She also worked as an investigative reporter for The Riverfront Times where she received recognition and numerous accolades from the National Black Journalists Association, the National Gay and Lesbian Journalism Association, the National Education Writers Association, and the Society of Environmental Journalists to name just some.

Jeannette Batz-Cooperman has been a columnist for the Catholic Reporter, and her work has appeared in Seventeen Magazine, O: the Oprah Winfrey Magazine, the Utne Reader, Glamour Magazine, the Boston Globe, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.  She has written five nonfiction books and one murder mystery. Batz-Cooperman is now a staff writer for the literary magazine The Common Reader at Washington University in St. Louis.

Edward McPherson, associate professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis, is the author of three books: Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat (Faber & Faber), The Backwash Squeeze and Other Improbable Feats (HarperCollins), and The History of the Future: American Essays (Coffee House Press). He has written for the New York Times Magazine, the Paris Review, the American Scholar, the Gettysburg Review, Salon, Guernica, the Southern Review, and the New York Observer, among many others. Edward McPherson has received numerous awards and recognitions, including a Pushcart Prize, the PEN Southwest Book Award, the Gulf Coast Prize in Fiction, an Artist Fellowship from the Regional Arts Commission of St. Louis, a Minnesota State Arts Board grant, and the Gesell Award from the University of Minnesota, where he received his MFA. He is a creative writing teacher and contributing editor of the Common Reader at Washington University.

Monica Sok, a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University,  is a Cambodian American poet and the daughter of refugees. She is the author of the brand new A Nail the Evening Hangs On from Copper Canyon Press. Ms. Sok's work has been recognized with a "Discovery" Prize from 92Y. She has received fellowships and residencies from the Poetry Society of America, Hedgebrook, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, Kundiman, the Jerome Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, the Saltonstall Foundation, and others. Monica Sok also teaches poetry to Southeast Asian youths at the Center for Empowering Refugees and Immigrants in Oakland, California. She is originally from Lancaster, Pennsylvania.