English department announces 2008-2009 Writers' Series
The University of Richmond’s Department of English has announced that it will bring 11 writers to campus during the 2008-2009 academic year for its annual Writers’ Series.
The writers are novelists, poets, dramatists and memoirists and come from the United States, Australia, Ireland and Israel. Among them are winners of the Pulitzer Prize, the Booker Prize, the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Cannes Film Festival’s Camera d’Or Prize, the Lamont Prize, the Hennessey Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
The series is designed to expose Richmond students and the greater university community to living writers. The readings are always free and open to the general public. Most writers make themselves available, following their appearance, to answer questions from the audience and sign copies of their books.
Peter Carey, Australian novelist
October 1, 2008 at 7 p.m.
Weinstein Hall’s Brown-Alley Room
Peter Carey is one of only two writers to have won the Booker Prize twice (the other being J.M. Coetzee). His books, which close the gap between literary and popular worlds, deal with the complexities of personal identity, questions of authenticity and fakery and the role of the artist and the outsider. In The True History of the Kelly Gang, Carey recreates the voice of Australian legend Ned Kelly—a thief and murderer to some, a hero to others—writing in a semiliterate but magically descriptive style that The Boston Globe calls "a spectacular feat of imagination." Oscar and Lucinda, perhaps his most celebrated book, was later made into a film starring Ralph Fiennes.
Along with the Booker Prize, Carey has received the Miles Franklin Award three times, the Commonwealth Writers Prize and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Born in Australia in 1943, he now lives in New York City, where he teaches creative writing at Hunter College.
CANCELLED- John Kinsella, Australian poet, fiction writer, memoirist and dramatist
October 6, 2008 at 8 p.m.
Weinstein Hall’s Brown-Alley Room
John Kinsella has published over 40 books of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and drama, including Peripheral Light: Selected and New Poems (edited and introduced by Harold Bloom), the memoirs Auto and Fast, Loose Beginnings, and the book of short stories Grappling Eros. He founded the Australian magazine Salt and its publishing arm Salt Publishing, and he has edited several anthologies of Australian poetry, including Landbridge: Contemporary Australian Poetry. Kinsella has received numerous awards for his poetry, which largely focuses on the interactions between humans and the natural world and encompasses both traditional and experimental poetic modes to create a truly international hybridized poetry. A Fellow of Churchill College at Cambridge University, he divides his time between England and Western Australia.
Pam Brown, Australian poet
October 20, 2008 at 8 p.m.
Weinstein Hall’s Brown-Alley Room
Pam Brown has earned a living as a librarian, nurse, publisher’s assistant, postal worker, artworker and teacher of writing, multi-media studies and film-making. She has published fourteen books of poetry and prose, all with independent publishers. Her volume of new and selected poems, Dear Deliria, received the New South Wales Premiers Award and was cited for “its provocative and witty engagement with personal, social and political issues,” ability to invite “reconsideration of mundane experiences and events” and “edginess of language and … emotional honesty, daring, and intellectual curiosity.” She has been associate editor of the online journal Jacket since 2004. Her most recent book is True Thoughts. She has lived in Sydney for the past 40 years.
Margaret Gibson, American poet and memoirist
October 21, 2008 at 7 p.m.
Keller Hall Memorial Room
Margaret Gibson is the author of nine books of poetry, including Long Walks in the Afternoon, winner of the 1982 Lamont Prize, and The Vigil: A Poem in Four Voices, a finalist for the National Book Award in 1993. Her most recent work is a memoir, The Prodigal Daughter: Reclaiming an Unfinished Childhood, in which she writes about her upbringing in Richmond, Virginia, and the process of making peace with the dichotomous forces of her past. As Shannon Ravenel confirms, “Margaret Gibson's evocation of urban southern society in the 1950s is so on target it's scary. This is a brilliant book.” The recipient of an NEA grant, a Lila Wallace/Reader’s Digest Fellowship, and two Pushcart Prizes, Gibson is presently Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Connecticut and lives in Preston, Connecticut.
Bliss Broyard, American fiction writer and memoirist
November 17, 2008 at 4 p.m.
Weinstein Hall’s Brown-Alley Room
Bliss Broyard is the author of two books: a “beautifully choreographed” collection of stories, My Father Dancing, (Booklist reviewer Donna Seaman) and a provocative memoir/family history, One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life—A Story of Race and Family Secrets. Broyard’s short fiction has appeared in a variety of venues and was selected for both the Best American Short Stories of 1998 and The Pushcart Anthology.
The daughter of New York Times literary critic Anatole Broyard, Bliss Broyard learned when she was in her early twenties and shortly before her father died in 1990, that he had African ancestry. One Drop explores the reasons behind her father’s choice to pass for white, traces her hidden family history back to New Orleans, details her meetings with family members whom she did not know and reveals her own struggle to come to terms with what all of this means for her own identity and sense of self. Her latest book, which reads like a novel, was published to widespread acclaim last fall and will be out in paperback in September. The Richmond Quest is sponsoring Broyard’s visit.
Katy Lederer, American poet and memoirist
January 29, 2009 at 8 p.m.
Weinstein Hall’s Brown-Alley Room
Katy Lederer has published two books of poetry, Winter Sex and The Heaven-Sent Leaf, as well as the memoir Poker Face: A Girlhood Among Gamblers. Poker Face was named one of the best books of 2003 by Esquire and was a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection. Her work has been praised for its intellectual heft, lyricism and crisp style. Lederer is poetry editor of Fence and a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She lives in Brooklyn.
Jennifer Atkinson, American Poet
February 5, 2009 at 8 p.m.
Weinstein Hall’s Brown-Alley Room
Jennifer Atkinson is the author of three books of poetry: The Dogwood Tree, The Drowned City, which won the Samuel Morse Prize, and Drift Ice. Her poems elegantly examine issues of spirituality and the natural world. A recipient of the Pushcart Prize, she teaches at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.
Vona Groarke, Irish poet
February 19, 2009 at 8 p.m.
Weinstein Hall’s Brown-Alley Room
One of Ireland’s most prominent younger poets, Vona Groarke has published four books of poetry and has received numerous prizes for her work, including the Hennessy Award and the Brendan Behan Memorial Prize. Her third book, Flight, was short-listed for the Forward Prize in England and received the 2003 Michael Hartnett Award. Formally and visually exact, her poems demonstrate a powerful commitment to place, family life and the song-like qualities of language. She divides her time between the University of Manchester in England and Wake Forest University in North Carolina.
Andrew Zawacki, American poet
February 26 at 8 p.m.
Weinstein Hall's Brown-Alley Room
Andrew Zawacki is the author of three books of poetry: By Reason of Breakings (University of Georgia Press, 2002), Anabranch (Wesleyan University Press, 2004), and the newly released Petals of Zero Petals of One (Talisman House, 2009). He edited Afterwards: Slovenian Writing 1945-1995 and co-edited The Verse Book of Interviews. His first book has been translated into French, and his criticism has appeared in many publications around the world, including the Times Literary Supplement, New German Critique, Religion and Literature and Boston Review. A former Rhodes Scholar and Fulbright Scholar, and a graduate of the College of William and Mary, he teaches at the University of Georgia.
Etgar Keret, Israeli novelist and filmmaker
March 23, 2009 at 7 p.m.
Weinstein Hall’s Brown-Alley Room
Winner of the Camera d’Or Prize at the Cannes Film Festival for his feature Jellyfish, Etgar Keret is hailed as the voice of young Israel and one of its extraordinary fiction and film writers. Born in Tel Aviv in 1967 to an extremely diverse family (his brother heads an Israeli group that lobbies for the legalization of marijuana, his sister is an orthodox Jew and the mother of ten children), Keret regards his family as a microcosm of Israel.
His works, including The Nimrod Flip-Out and The Girl on the Fridge, fuse the banal with the surreal, shot through with a casual, comic-strip violence depicting a world simultaneously funny and sad. In addition to his award at Cannes, he is the recipient of the Ministry of Culture’s Cinema Prize (Israel) and the Israeli Film Academy Award, as well as the Prime Minister’s Prize for his short stories. He presently lives in Tel Aviv with his wife, the filmmaker Shira Geffen, where he is a lecturer at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva and Tel Aviv University.
Paul Muldoon, Irish poet and dramatist
March 30, 2009 at 8 p.m.
Weinstein Hall’s Brown-Alley Room
The internationally acclaimed poet Paul Muldoon has published 10 books of poetry, including Moy Sand and Gravel, which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Griffin International Prize, and The Annals of Chile, which won the T.S. Eliot Prize in England. Muldoon also has received the Irish Times Poetry Prize, the European Prize for Poetry and the Shakespeare Prize, and he has published the play Six Honest Serving Men and the operas Shining Brow, Bandanna and Vera of Las Vegas.
Muldoon attended Queen’s University in Belfast, where he met future Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney, an early champion of Muldoon’s work. From 1973 to 1986, Muldoon worked for the BBC in Belfast as a radio and television producer, moving to the United States in 1987. From 1999 to 2004, he was professor of poetry at Oxford, and his lectures were collected in The End of the Poem. He is currently Howard G.B. Clark ’21 Professor at Princeton University and poetry editor of The New Yorker.
Mark Doty, American poet and memoirist
April 9, 2009 at 7 p.m.
Weinstein Hall’s Brown-Alley Room
Mark Doty, the only American poet to have won Great Britain's T. S. Eliot Prize, is the author of six books of poems, most recently School of the Arts (2005). In 1993, his third collection, My Alexandria, received both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. As W.S. Merwin notes, “A new book of poems—or of anything—by Mark Doty is good news in a dark time. The precision, daring, scope, elegance of his compassion and of the language in which he embodies it are a reassuring pleasure.”
Also a memoirist, his 2007 volume, Dog Years, earned a starred review from Publishers Weekly for its exploration of “the complicated, loving territory inhabited by devoted dogs and their loyal humans”—a book “nimbly sidestepping sentimentality and landing squarely on a philosophical, inquisitive tone as intellectually evocative as it is emotionally resonant.” A recipient of two NEA fellowships and the Witter Byner Prize, Doty presently teaches in the graduate program at the University of Houston.
Posted June 16, 2008