Apr. 20, 2009: MFA Reading at RiverRun Bookstore, Portsmouth 
Join us for a reading of original works by UNH MFA students!
When: Monday, April 20th
Time: 7:00 p.m.
Where: RiverRun Bookstore, 20 Congress Street, Portsmouth
Featured readings include:
Nathan Webster, "Can't Give This War Away"
Becca Yuan, "The End and Back: A Collection of Stories"
Sue Reynolds, "Walking on Edge"
Michael Mangan, "The Last Secret Spot: Surfing, Psychology, and The Quest for Authenticity"
This event is free and open to the public. For additional information about this event, please contact RiverRun bookstore: www.riverrunbookstore.com, or (603) 431-2100.
Additional information about the authors:
Sue Reynolds has been writing all of her life. "Writing poetry provides a flashlight with which to maneuver the darkness and mystery inside and around me,” she says. “Writing's always a tremendous relief." She has wallpapered her powder room with rejection letters from The New York Times, Atlantic, Poetry, The Missouri Review, Agni, Apple Valley Review, Alice James Books, Green Mountains Review, and The Missouri Review, just to name those on one wall. However, her poetry was included in an anthology of Maine women's poetry published by the Maine Humanities Council. She's saving the space on the mirror wall for acceptances to come.
Nathan S. Webster embedded twice as a freelance photojournalist with US forces in Iraq to create his journalistic memoir, "Can't Give This War Away." Webster conveys his observations and impressions of a company of 82nd Airborne Division paratroopers at war in the Iraq of 2007, at the very beginning of the "surge." Alongside this recent history are narratives about Webster's first experience in Iraq, as a soldier himself during Desert Storm in 1991. Elements of Webster's reporting were used in Pulitzer Prize winning author Tom Ricks' recent bestseller about Iraq, "The Gamble." Webster's work has appeared online in The Summerset Review and The Long War Journal. Inspired most by legendary war correspondent Ernie Pyle, Webster's stories have appeared in daily newspapers coast-to-coast, from Brunswick, Maine to Walla Walla, Washington, and other towns, large and small, across the United States.
Becca Yuan is a transplanted Midwesterner. She grew up split between two places: Tulsa Oklahoma, where she lived with her parents during the school year, and her grandparents cattle ranch in Boise City, a tiny town at the very tip of the panhandle. Growing up in two places has given her something of a split personality. She loves the vibrant energy of cities, but if she spends too much time in one, she’ll inevitably long for wide-open space. She’s always loved reading and writing fiction, and her favorite stories are those that blend mythic concepts and realism to create something new. All of the stories in her collection called “The End and Back” deal with unexpected transformations, from a realistic short story about how relationships shift over time to a fairytale in which a dragon becomes human.
Michael Mangan: holds an M.A. in Academic Research Psychology from Humboldt State University, an M.A. in the History of Psychology and a Ph.D. in Social Psychology, both from the University of New Hampshire, Durham. He is presently completing an MFA in the Department of English, UNH, Durham. Mangan has published and presented research in the areas of person perception, judgment and decision-making, history of psychology, Internet research methods and sleep medicine. He is presently a full-time lecturer in psychology at the University of New Hampshire, Durham and a consultant on various projects for Granite State College. His non-academic passions include: spending time with his family, surfing (a 30-year veteran), and playing guitar and singing with his alternative/classic rock band (we have a lot of originals too) “Fling.”