Amy Sage Webb
Amy Sage Webb directs the Creative Writing Program at Emporia State University, where she has served as a professor of writing, literary editing, and American literature since 1996. Webb's writing focuses largely on working-class characters, and draws considerably from the wide variety of jobs she's held and from places she's lived. Most of the short stories in her current fiction manuscript Save Your Own Life take place in Kansas, specifically the Flint Hills region. Webb has a farm west of Americus, and her only neighbor there is the ESU Biology Department's field station, a 200-acre natural history preserve to the north.
"We're excited to welcome Webb as a Kansas writer who writes about her life in the Flint Hills," says fiction writer and Assistant Professor Karen Stolz. "It's good for students to discover that there is something worthy to write about right in their own back yards."
Webb's reading is cosponsored by the Women's Studies department for Women's History Month. "Each March, we like to bring in a woman writer for the series," says series director and Women's Studies Vice-Director Laura Lee Washburn. "I don't ask them to speak about Women's History, but instead to lead by example, which Amy Sage Webb does admirably."
In 2005, Webb began serving as national Pedagogy Specialist for Antioch University, Los Angeles, where she conducts workshops in creative writing pedagogy, as well as giving lectures and readings on pedagogy and literature. She has edited several literary journals, including Kansas Quarterly, Hayden's Ferry Review, and Flint Hills Review. She served as managing editor for Bluestem Press and she continues to serve on the editorial board of Woodley Memorial Press, and as a reviewer for the Kansas Arts Commission. She is a contributing writer and editor to several books and readers, including Mooring Against the Tide: Writing Poetry and Fiction, and Power and Identity :The Authority Project. Her poetry and fiction appear in numerous literary journals, such as Fourth River and Clackamas Literary Review. In 2007 she was nominated for the Pushcart Prize.
Webb's reading is also sponsored by the Student Fee Council. A reception will be held after the reading, in the Heritage Room of the Student Center.