Bradford Morrow

Welles-Brown Room,
Rush Rhees Library

22 Apr 2008, 8:00 p.m.

Bradford Morrow is the author of the novels Come Sunday, The Almanac Branch (a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award), Trinity Fields, Giovanni's Gift, and Ariel's Crossing. His children's books include A Bestiary, illustrated by 18 major American artists, among them Eric Fischl, Kiki Smith, Joel Shapiro and Richard Tuttle, and Didn't Didn't Do It, in collaboration with legendary cartoonist Gahan Wilson. Morrow has edited numerous books, most recently, with Sam Hamill, The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth. In 1998, the American Academy of the Arts and Letters presented him with the Academy Award in Literature. The founder and editor of the literary journal, Conjunctions, Morrow is a professor of literature and Bard Center Fellow at Bard College.

In 2007 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction as well as the PEN/Nora Magid Award for excellence in literary journal editing. Recently completed books include a new novel, The Fifth Turning, and Lush, a collection of thirteen Gothic stories. He is currently at work on a
new novel, The Prague Sonatas. Morrow lives in New York.

David Mason

Welles-Brown Room,
Rush Rhees Library

24 Sep 2007, 5:00 pm

David Mason’s books of poems include The Buried Houses (winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize), The Country I Remember (winner of the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award), and Arrivals. His verse novel, Ludlow, has just been published. Author of a collection of essays, The Poetry of Life and the Life of Poetry, Mason has also co-edited several textbooks and anthologies, including Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry, Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism, Twentieth Century American Poetry, and Twentieth Century American Poetics: Poets on the Art of Poetry. His poetry, prose and translations have appeared in such periodicals as Harper’s, The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times, The Times Literary Supplement, Poetry, Agenda, Modern Poetry in Translation, The New Criterion, The Yale Review, The Hudson Review, The American Scholar, The Irish Times, and The Southern Review.

A former Fulbright Fellow to Greece, he lives in the mountains outside Colorado Springs with his wife, Anne Lennox.

MELIORA WEEKEND

David Leavitt

Lander Auditorium,
Hutchison Hall

20 Oct 2007, 3:30 pm

Professor David Leavitt graduated from Yale University in 1983 with a BA in English. He is the author of the short story collections Family Dancing (finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Prize and the National Book Critics’ Circle Award), A Place I’ve Never Been, Arkansas, and The Marble Quilt, as well as the novels The Lost Language of Cranes, Equal Affections, While England Sleeps (Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Fiction Prize), The Page Turner, Martin Bauman, or A Sure Thing, and The Body of Jonah Boyd. In 2002, he published Florence, A Delicate Case as part of Bloomsbury’s series “The Writer and the City.” His Collected Stories was published in 2003 by Bloomsbury. The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Origins of the Computer appeared in 2005 and a new novel, The Indian Clerk, is due out in fall 2007. Professor Leavitt is also the editor of Subtropics, a new literary magazine.

With Mark Mitchell, Professor Leavitt is co-author of Italian Pleasures and In Maremma: Life and a House in Southern Tuscany, and co-editor of the anthologies The Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories and Pages Passed from Hand to Hand. His work has appeared in many newspapers and magazines, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Harper’s, Esquire, Vogue, The Paris Review, DoubleTake, The Southwest Review, Tin House, Food & Wine and Travel and Leisure. He has also taught at Princeton University.

A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation and the Institute of Catalan Letters in Barcelona Spain, Professor Leavitt was recently named a Literary Lion by the New York Public Library.

Audio Interview with David Leavitt

Wikipedia article about David Leavitt

David Leavitt filmography on IMDB

Review of The Page Turner and interview with David Leavitt

David Leavitt books

Tom Sleigh

Welles-Brown Room,
Rush Rhees Library

30 Oct 2007, 8:00 pm

Tom Sleigh attended the California Institute of the Arts, Evergreen State College, and earned an M.A. from Johns Hopkins University. His most recent collections include Space Walk (Houghton Mifflin, 2007), and Far Side of the Earth (2003), named an Honor Book by the Massachusetts Society for the Book. He is the author of After One, winner of the Houghton Mifflin New Poetry Series Prize, 1983; Waking (1990), a New York Times Book Review Notable Book, and a finalist for the Lamont Poetry Prize; The Chain (l996), nominated for the Lenore Marshall Prize; and The Dreamhouse (1999), a selection of the Academy of American Poet’s Poetry Book Club and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. He has also published a translation of Euripides's Herakles (Oxford University Press, 2000), and a book of essays, Interview With a Ghost (Graywolf Press, 2006).

Among his many awards are an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letter, the Shelley Award from the Poetry Society of America, an Individual Writer's Award from the Lila Wallace Fund, and grants from the Guggenheim and Ingram Merill Foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Hunter College and lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Anthony Giardina

Welles-Brown Room,
Rush Rhees Library

14 Nov 2007, 8:00 pm

Anthony Giardina's fourth and most recent novel, White Guys was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2006, and in paperback by Picador earlier this year. He is also the author of the novels Men With Debts, A Boy’s Pretensions and Recent History, as well as the story collection The Country of Marriage. His plays have been produced in New York at the Manhattan Theater Club and Playwrights Horizons, and at many of the major regional theaters in the U.S., including Seattle Rep, the Long Wharf in New Haven, and the Cleveland Playhouse. His short stories, essays and articles have appeared in Harper's, Esquire, GQ, and the New York Times Magazine. He is a regular Visiting Professor at the Michener Center at the University of Texas in Austin.

Robert Boyers
Peg Boyers

Welles-Brown Room,
Rush Rhees Library

11 December 2007, 5:00 pm

Peg Boyers is executive editor of Salmagundi and author of Hard Bread, also published by the University of Chicago Press. She teaches creative writing at Skidmore College. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The New Republic, Slate, Ploughshares, Raritan, Daedalus, Notre Dame Review, Southern Review, Southwest Review, New England Review, Ontario Review, Partisan Review, The New Criterion, Michigan Quarterly Review, Guernica, and other magazines. She is author of two books of poems, Hard Bread (University of Chicago Press, 2002) and Honey with Tobacco (University of Chicago Press, 2007).

She has translated, from Spanish and Italian, such writers as Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Natalia Ginzburg. She has also conducted extensive published interviews with such writers as Ariel Dorfman and Natalia Ginzburg.

Robert Boyers is Tisch Professor of Arts and Letters at Skidmore College, editor of Salmagundi, and director of the New York State Summer Writers Institute. He is the author of several books, including Atrocity and Amnesia: The Political Novel Since 1945, and a book of stories, Excitable Women, Damaged Men. Boyers is also a frequent contributor to Harper's, The New Republic, and other journals.

Claudia Rankine

Welles-Brown Room,
Rush Rhees Library

6 Mar 2008, 8:00 p.m.

Claudia Rankine is the author of four collections of poetry, including Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (Graywolf, 2004), PLOT (Grove/Atlantic, 2001), The End Of The Alphabet (Grove/Atlantic, 1998), and Nothing in Nature is Private (Cleveland State University Poetry Press, 1995). She is also co-editor of American Women Poets in the Twenty-First Century: Where Lyric Meets Language and American Poets in the Twenty-First Century: The New Poetics (Wesleyan University Press). A recipient of fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and the Lannan Foundation, she is the Henry G. Lee ‘37 Professor of English at Pomona College.

Of her most recent book Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, an experimental multi-genre project that blends poetry, essays, and images, poet Robert Creeley said: "It’s master work in every sense, and
altogether her own."

John Koethe

Welles-Brown Room,
Rush Rhees Library

27 Mar 2008, 8:00 p.m.

John Koethe is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the first Poet Laureate of Milwaukee, where he lives. His collection North Point North was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and his collection Falling Water won the Kingsley Tufts Award. In 2005 he was a Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin. He is also the author of The Continuity of Wittgenstein's Thought and Scepticism, Knowledge, and Forms of Reasoning (Cornell University Press).

His gift to readers is an elegiac poetry that explores the transitory nature of ordinary human experience. Of his book Sally’s Hair, the most recent of his seven books of poems, it was said, “The beautiful poems in this new collection celebrate the creative power of human beings, the only weapon we possess against time's relentless 'slow approach to anonymity and death.' " John Ashbery said of his book, Falling Water, "As a poet who is a teacher of philosophy, John Koethe knows better than most of us the uses and dissatisfactions of both disciplines, if indeed they are disciplines. In this ravishing and haunted book he comes face to face with the time when 'more than half my life is gone,' and must try to find the meaning of 'a childish/dream of love, and then the loss of love, and all the intricate years between.' As funny and fresh as it is tragic and undeceived, Falling Water ranks with Wallace Stevens' Auroras of Autumn as one of the profoundest meditations on existence ever formulated by an American Poet."

David Treuer

Welles-Brown Room,
Rush Rhees Library

8 Apr 2008, 8:00 p.m.

David Treuer is an Ojibwe Indian from Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota. He is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to Canada, a Pushcart Prize, the 1996 Minnesota Book Award and was a finalist for the Penn West prize in 1999. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and is currently completing his fourth novel, Neverland. He divides his time between his home on Leech Lake Reservation and Minneapolis.

The son of Robert Treuer, a holocaust survivor, and Margaret Seelye Treuer, a tribal court judge, David Treuer grew up on Leech Lake Reservation. He attended Princeton University where he wrote two senior theses—one in anthropology and one in creative writing. Treuer graduated in 1992 and published his first novel, Little, in 1995. He received his PhD in anthropology and published his second novel, The Hiawatha, in 1999. His third novel, The Translation of Dr. Apelles, was published in 2006, and was named a "Best Book of the Year" for 2006 by the Washington Post, Time Out Chicago, and the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

His novels have been translated into Norwegian, Finnish, French, and Greek.