Novelist Colson Whitehead will teach at Richmond this fall as Tucker-Boatwright Writer-in-Residence

Colson Whitehead, author of five novels including, most recently, Sag Harbor, has been named the University of Richmond’s Fall 2009 Tucker-Boatwright Writer-in-Residence in the Department of English.

While at Richmond, Whitehead will teach two creative writing classes—Writing Fiction and The Structure of Fiction: The Long and the Short of It. Of The Structure of Fiction, Whitehead said, “We’ll focus on longer pieces of work, on formulating the rules and landscape of your world, whether it is a series of linked stories (featuring the same characters or locale), a novella, or more fantastic fiction, which may require building a world from scratch.” Despite the fact that both courses are 300-level creative writing classes, some spaces in each course have been specifically reserved for first-year Richmond students. Interested first-year students should contact Suzanne Jones for registration information.

While at Richmond this fall, Whitehead will also give a public reading of Sag Harbor on Tuesday, September 22 at 7 p.m. in Weinstein Hall’s Brown-Alley Room.

An April 29 Washington Post review by Ron Charles terms Whitehead's autobiographical novel Sag Harbor  “masterful,” “wise,” and “affectionate” in its narration. He wrote, “Charm alone drives most of these chapters, the seductive voice of a narrator as clever as he is self-deprecating, moving from one comic anecdote to the next with infectious delight in his own memories... the gentle ribbing of all sides of America’s peculiar racial tension is central to Whitehead’s immense appeal.” In a May 3 New York Times Book Review, Touré puts Whitehead in a group of African American writers and artists who are reshaping “the iconography of blackness.”

In addition to Sag Harbor, Colson Whitehead has published four other novels: The Intuitionist, John Henry Days, The Colossus of New York and Apex of the Hurt. Whitehead’s first novel The Intuitionist won the Quality Paperback Book Club New Voices Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. John Henry Days won the New York Public Library Young Lions Award and was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His reviews and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Granta, Harper’s, The Village Voice, Salon and Newsday. The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and the Whiting Writers Award, Whitehead has taught creative writing at Brooklyn College, Columbia University, Hunter College, Princeton and the University of Houston.

Posted May 21, 2009