To kick off Arcadia’s new Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing degree, the program is hosting a reading on August 3 in the Castle Dining Room at 7 p.m. Professors Quincy Scott Jones and Joshua Isard will read from their work as well as visiting writers Paul Elwork ’04M and Paula Raimondo ’06 M.Ed. A question-and-answer session will follow.

Jones is an Adjunct Professor of English at Arcadia. He earned his Bachelor’s degree from Brown University, master’s degree from Temple University, and $100 once working as supermarket clown. His work has been or is forthcoming in African American Review, Journal of Pan African Studies, Water~Stone Review, California Quarterly, Let Loose on the World: Celebrating Amiri Baraka at 75 and the anthology From Where We Sit: Black Writers Write Black Youth. Since 2006 he has taught “Poetry on Page and Stage,” a course exploring the idea of poetry as live performance as well as a performance on the page. With Nina Sharma he co-created the Noreaster Exchange: a multicultural, multi-city reading series. His first book, The T-Bone Series, was published by Whirlwind Press in 2009.

Isard serves as the Coordinator of the MFA program. A native of the Philadelphia area, he has been teaching creative writing, composition, and literature since 2004. Before coming to Arcadia, he held positions at Temple University and Drexel University. He completed his undergraduate studies at Temple University, and studied creative writing at the University of Edinburgh with acclaimed writers Alan Jamieson and Dilys Rose. Professor Isard later earned a master’s degree in modern literature from University College London. His fiction has recently appeared in Inscribed, Barrier Islands Review, The Broadkill Review, and Press 1. He has also worked with and written for several publications, including The American Poetry Review and Philadelphia Weekly.

Raimondo was named the 2008 Bucks County Poet Laureate and teaches at Bucks Country Community College. She earned her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and Oxford University, and has studied writing at the 92nd Street Y. Her poems have appeared in the Sarah Lawrence Review, Poetry Daily and the Beloit Poetry Journal.

Elwork has a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from Temple University and a master’s degree in English from Arcadia University. His stories have been published in various literary journals, including SmokeLong Quarterly, Philadelphia Stories, Word Riot, Quiet Feather, and Johnny America. His novel The Girl Who Would Speak for the Dead came out from Amy Einhorn Books (Penguin Group) in March 2011.

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