Each year the College of Humanities and Fine Arts, the Department of English and Philosophy and the Creative Writing Program bring a number of nationally known writers to the Murray State campus to give readings of their work and answer questions from students in the Creative Writing Program. The series culminates in the annual Jesse Stuart Kentucky Writers Series. A reading series is also held in conjunction with each residency of the MFA in Creative Writing program. These events are open and free to the general public.

In addition to the Reading Series, a number of student readings are also held throughout the year. A variety of diverse organizations and individuals have sponsored readings in the past, including the English Student Organization, the Black Student Union, and Murray State's student literary magazine, Notations.

MSU Reading Series   |    MFA Residency Readings   |   Jesse Stuart Kentucky Writers Series

Brett Eugene Ralph spent the better part of his youth in Louisville, Ky., playing football and singing in punk rock bands. His work has appeared in publications such as Conduit, Mudfish, Willow Springs, and The American Poetry Review, and his poems have been anthologized in The McSweeney's Book of Poets Picking Poets and The Stiffest of the Corpse: An Exquisite Corpse Reader. His first full-length collection, Black Sabbatical, was selected for the Linda Bruckheimer Series in Kentucky Literature and published by Sarabande Books in July 2009. Ralph has taught at the University of Massachusetts, Missouri State University, and the Central Institute of Buddhist Studies in the Himalayas of northern India. Currently, he lives in Empire, Ky., and teaches at Hopkinsville Community College. His country rock ensemble, Brett Eugene Ralph's Kentucky Chrome Revue, can be heard in seedy dives throughout the South.

Barry Kitterman grew up in California's San Joaquin Valley, and received an AB (English) from the University of California at Berkeley. After two years in the Peace Corps (Belize) in the mid-seventies, he completed the MFA program at the University of Montana in 1981. He has taught writing and literature at IU East, Miami University of Ohio, and at two universities in the People's Republic of China, Nankai and Qingdao. In 1989-90 he was Hudson Walker fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Mass. Since 1994, he has taught at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tenn., where he currently coordinates the creative writing program and the visiting writers series. He has published short fiction and nonfiction in The Carolina Quarterly, The Chariton Review, Turnstile, Flyway and elsewhere. He is the fiction editor for Zone 3 Magazine (APSU) and is an associate editor of The Green Hills Literary Lantern (Truman State University). In 2001, he received an individual artist's grant from the Tennessee Arts Commission. His novel The Baker's Boy was published in May 2008. He lives with his wife, Jill Eichhorn, and their two children, Teddy and Hannah, in Clarksville, Tenn.