Readers & Writers: Bringing Nationally Known Writers to Baton Rouge

Welcome to
Readers & Writers
Bringing Nationally Known Writers to Baton Rouge

About Us:

Thank you for visiting the official Readers & Writers (R&W) website and allowing us to introduce ourselves. Our mission is to encourage literary exhanges between the university and the community by providing a forum for readings and lively discussions of fiction, poetry, and LSU scholarship. Since our beginning in 1993, we have hosted several Pulitzer Prize winners, numerous National Book Award recipients, upcoming literary stars, and many renowned Southern writers. Our guests have included such literary greats as Lisel Mueller, Richard Ford, Lee Smith, Ellen Douglas, Barry Hannah, Robert Olen Butler, Tillie Olsen, James Wilcox, Andrei Codrescu, Gloria Naylor, and many more.

We look forward to sharing the excitement of live readings with you. As a member, you will be a part of the fund-raising process that supports our mission. Please click here for the membership form.

Who We Are:

Readers & Writers is planned and operated by a committee directed by Laura Mullen. Ava Haymon is community director, Lee Bauknight is coordinator and Erin Breaux handles publicity. Each semester, at least ten committee members from the LSU English Department help with all other aspects of presenting our readers to the LSU and Baton Rouge communities.



Welcome to Readers & Writers Bringing Nationally Known Writers to Baton Rouge About Us: Thank you for visiting the official Readers & Writers (R&W) website and allowing us to introduce ourselves. Our mission is to encourage literary exhanges between the university and the community by providing a forum for readings and lively discussions of fiction, poetry, and LSU scholarship. Since our beginning in 1993, we have hosted several Pulitzer Prize winners, numerous National Book Award recipients, upcoming literary stars, and many renowned Southern writers. Our guests have included such literary greats as Lisel Mueller, Richard Ford, Lee Smith, Ellen Douglas, Barry Hannah, Robert Olen Butler, Tillie Olsen, James Wilcox, Andrei Codrescu, Gloria Naylor, and many more. We look forward to sharing the excitement of live readings with you. As a member, you will be a part of the fund-raising process that supports our mission. Please click here for the membership form. Who We Are: Readers & Writers is planned and operated by a committee directed by Laura Mullen. Ava Haymon is community director, Lee Bauknight is coordinator and Erin Breaux handles publicity. Each semester, at least ten committee members from the LSU English Department help with all other aspects of presenting our readers to the LSU and Baton Rouge communities.
Director	Laura Mullen is on the faculty at Louisiana State University. She is the author of five books: The Surface ; After I Was Dead ; The Tales of Horror ; Subject , and Murmur , as well as a chapbook, Turn . She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Prize, and several MacDowell Colony Fellowships Her poetry has been widely anthologized and her prose has appeared in Civil Disobediences: Poetics & Politics in Action , Paraspheres , and elsewhere.
Community Director	Ava Leavell Haymon writes poems and plays, teaches workshops in poetry writing, and works in the Artists in the Schools program. Her poems are published widely in journals such as Northwest Review, Shenandoah , and Georgia Review. She reads her poems in many parts of the United States. The theater company Playmakers produces her plays for audiences of children all over Louisiana—most recently Jabberwocky and The Drowsy Princess. She has published two books of poetry from LSU Press: Kitchen Heat (2006) and The Strict Economy of Fire (2004).
Coordinator	Lee Bauknight took his MFA in fiction at University of South Carolina. He is the author of Present Tense: Contemporary Themes for Writers . An Instructor of English, and a program coordinator of Communication Across the Curriculum, Lee joins us this year as the new coordinator for Readers & Writers. You can reach him at 225-578-2236 or by writing to him at: Readers & Writers, English Department, LSU, Baton Rouge, LA 70803.
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