The Writers Place Reading Series featuring Matthew Goldberg, William Trowbridge, and Rick Christiansen

Mathew Goldberg’s story collection, Night Watch (Willow Springs Books) won the 2025 Spokane Prize for Short Fiction.  His stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Shenandoah, and American Short Fiction, among others.  He has received an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Arkansas Arts Council and a Special Mention for a Pushcart Prize.  He has a MFA in creative writing from the University of Arkansas and a degree in engineering from Duke University.

Rick Christiansen retired from corporate America ten years ago. He soon started writing to fill the time and to begin, as he has stated, to explain himself, to himself. He quickly discovered a knack for writing poetry and is now the author of Bone Fragments (2024) and Not a Hero (2025). Spartan Press. He has also completed but not yet published a third full length collection and a chapbook. His work has received two 2025 Pushcart Prize nominations and he was a finalist for the RHINO Poetry 2025 Founders Prize.

William Trowbridge’s eleventh poetry collection, Maintenance, came out from Spartan Press 2025. Over 550 of his poems have appeared in numerous literary magazines and in more than 50 anthologies and textbooks. He has published prose pieces in Vox Populi, New letters, the Georgia Review and The I-70 Review. He was Poet Laureate of Missouri from 2012 to 2016. For more information, see his website, wtrowbridge.net.