UA Arty Party April 20 to Benefit the Arts

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – The University of Alabama will take guests back in time to the literary hey day of the 1920s on Friday, April 20 for the fourth annual Arty Party with the theme “A Night at The Algonquin.”

Silent and live auctions, poems written on demand by graduate students, dinner, a special appearance by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Rick Bragg and a presentation of Arty Party writing awards to undergraduates will highlight the evening.

The Arty Party will begin at 6 p.m. in Smith Hall on the UA campus.

Individual tickets may be purchased for $100, patron tickets for $150, sponsors for $1,500 and benefactor sponsorships for $2,500. Tickets may be purchased by phoning 1-800/365-2302 or 205/348-7007. Patrons, table sponsors and event benefactors receive special recognition at the event.

Undergraduate students are being honored as part of the Arty Party Student Creative Writing Competition Awards in non-fiction, fiction and poetry and will receive prizes from special guest author and UA alumnus Winston Groom.

The auctions will offer a selection of popular goods and services donated by local artists and businesses. They include a trip to New York City and lunch with Sports Illustrated football reporter Franz Lidz, dinner for four at The Highlands Bar and Grill, a two-day Shoal Creek Club golfing experience for two with Esquire magazine golf writer Tom Chiarella, a football autographed by Nick Saban, all-inclusive hunting trips, dinner for 25 catered by Full Moon Barbeque, a week at an island home in the Bahamas, assorted jewelry, the opportunity to be a character in Pulitzer Prize winning author Rick Bragg’s upcoming novel, football tickets to the President’s Box in Bryant Denny Stadium, among other items.

More information about auction items can be found on the College of Arts and Sciences website by clicking on the Arty Party logo at www.as.ua.edu.

Artists featured in the auctions will include Lowell Baker, William Dooley, Frank Fleming, Peter Ivy, Danny Rountree, Maureen Shotts, MoJo Weaver and Gail Windham.

The Arty Party annually showcases and raises funds for the fine and performing arts at UA. This year it will highlight the UA creative writing program. Funds raised will help establish much-needed Professional Writer’s Development Grants and support scholarships and priority academic needs in the fine and performing arts.

Business sponsors for this year’s event include Harrison Construction, Publix, the Sexton Foundation, the Bank of Tuscaloosa and the John and Dori Holaday Foundation.

The event is sponsored by the College of Arts and Sciences Leadership Board and coordinated by the board’s Fine Arts Committee. The committee’s chair is Tricia Noble of Birmingham. Jan Mize and Stella Moore, of Tuscaloosa, are co-chairs.

Arty Party committee members include Wilson Green, Milla Green, Jan Mize, Ron Davis, Mary Jean Weaver and Claire Black of Tuscaloosa; Marjorie Forney, Marsha Aldridge King, Millie Hulsey, Shannon McClure Denney, Helen Mills, Tricia Noble, Barbara Stone, India Askew and Rae Trimmier of Birmingham; Susan Helmsing of Mobile; Elizabeth Crump of Montgomery; Katie Mitchell of Decatur; Carla Simmons of Jasper; William Price of Amarillo, Texas; and Woody Woodruff of Franklin, Tenn.

“We had a spectacular event last year and are looking forward to seeing the UA Creative Writing program shine this year. Our UA writers represent some of the best in the nation. We have also been hard at work selecting some fine items for the auction and feel that there will be something for everyone,” Noble said. “I think The Arty Party provides a fun event for our guests while raising money for a great cause.”

Michael Martone, professor of English in the Creative Writing program, said the UA Creative Writing program has a strong national reputation and has been named as one of the top 11 writing programs in the country.

“Our students are these great, quirky people with ambition, intricate histories and riveting talent,” Martone said. “Some arrive fresh out of undergraduate degree programs, some interrupt perfectly good careers; all have in common a love of the written word to which they plan to do justice for the rest of their lives.

“Our graduates hold influential editorial positions at magazines, major publishing houses, and on-line venues, and teach in private and public colleges and universities. Regardless of what they do when they leave here, they leave with a network of readers for their future productions, a developed sense of how to balance the needs of the writer with more workday demands, and more often than not, lifelong friends,” said Martone.

Students come from all over the country to attend the Creative Writing program. Many creative writing alumni have been published and featured in magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, The New Yorker, Poetry, Paris Review, Story and in such anthologies as “New Stories from the South,” “Scribner’s Best of the Writing Workshops,” “Best American Poetry,” and “The Pushcart Prize.”

Members of the program have received The Ruth Lily Poetry Fellowship, The Wallace Stegner Fellowship, The Jacob Javits Fellowship, and The Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship. They have also won a Yale Younger Poets Prize, the 2001 AWP Award Series in creative non-fiction, a New Millennium Writing Award in poetry, and Atlantic Monthly Student Writing Prizes in poetry, non-fiction and fiction. Many graduates have also published books with an array of presses covering the contemporary gamut, from Graywolf Press to the University of Mississippi Press, to Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill and Little, Brown.

The auctioneer for the event will be David Farmer, president of Heritage Realty of Trussville.

The College of Arts and Sciences is Alabama’s largest liberal arts college and the University’s largest division, with 355 faculty and 6,600 students. It offers the state’s most comprehensive arts education programs at both the undergraduate and graduate level.