Dana Spiotta

Welles-Brown Room,
Rush Rhees Library

5 Feb 2013, 5:00 pm

Dana Spiotta is the author of three novels: Stone Arabia, Eat the Document, and Lightning Field. Her first novel, Lightning Field, was listed as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Eat the Document was a finalist for the National Book Award, and her latest novel, Stone Arabia, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Spiotta is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and was awarded the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize for Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She teaches in the Syracuse University MFA Program.

Ellen Bryant Voigt

Welles-Brown Room,
Rush Rhees Library

5 Mar 2013, 5:00 pm

Ellen Bryant Voigt has published seven volumes of poetry, including Kyrie (1995), a finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle Award, Shadow of Heaven (2002), and Messenger: New and Selected Poems (2007), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of The Poets' Prize. A new collection, Headwaters, will appear in September 2013, and her prose work includes The Flexible Lyric, a collection of essays on craft, and The Art of Syntax: Rhythm of Thought, Rhythm of Song. A former Vermont Poet Laureate, she has been a Chancellor of American Academy of Poets and an elected member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Twice a finalist for the National Book Award, she has received NEA and Guggenheim Fellowships, the Academy of American Poets' Fellowship, Best American and Pushcart Prizes, and the OB Hardison Award from the Folger Shakespeare Library. She teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and lives in Cabot, VT.

Peter Ho Davies

Welles-Brown Room,
Rush Rhees Library

23 Apr 2013, 5:00 pm

Peter Ho Davies is the author of the novel The Welsh Girl and the story collections The Ugliest House in the World and Equal Love. His work has appeared in Harpers, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Paris Review, among others, and his short fiction has been widely anthologized, including selections for Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories. In 2003 Granta magazine named him among its "Best of Young British Novelists." Davies is a recipient of the Pen-Malamud Prize for excellence in the short story as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. The Ugliest House in the World won the John Llewelyn Rhys and PEN/Macmillan prizes; Equal Love, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, was also a finalist for The Los Angeles Times Book Prize; The Welsh Girl was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. Born in Britain to Welsh and Chinese parents, Davies now lives in Ann Arbor, and teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Michigan.

Henri Cole

Welles-Brown Room,
Rush Rhees Library

18 Sep 2012, 5:00 pm

Henri Cole was born in Fukuoka, Japan, in 1956. He has published eight collections of poetry, including Middle Earth, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. He has received many awards for his work, including the Kingsley Tufts Award, the Rome Prize, the Berlin Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Lenore Marshall Award. His most recent collection is Touch (published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011), which received the Jackson Prize. He teaches at Ohio State University and is poetry editor of The New Republic. He lives in Boston.

MELIORA WEEKEND

Jaimy Gordon

Hawkins-Carlson Room,
Rush Rhees Library

11 Oct 2012, 5:00 pm

Jaimy Gordon is the author of six books, most recently the National Book Award-winning novel Lord of Misrule. Her novel She Drove Without Stopping was awarded an Academy-Institute Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Bogeywoman was named an LA Times Best Book of the year. Gordon's short fiction, poems, essays, and translations have appeared in the Colorado Review, Missouri Review, Ploughshares, Antioch Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Poetry International, and many other journals, and have been anthologized in Best American Short Stories. She teaches in the MFA Program at Western Michigan University.

Tracy K. Smith

Welles-Brown Room,
Rush Rhees Library

13 Nov 2012, 5:00 pm

Tracy K. Smith is the author of three books of poetry. Her most recent collection, Life on Mars (Graywolf, 2011), won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize and was selected as a New York Times Notable Book. The collection draws on sources as disparate as Arthur C. Clarke and David Bowie, and is in part an elegiac tribute to her late father, an engineer who worked on the Hubble Telescope. Duende (2007) won the 2006 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets and an Essence Literary Award. The Body's Question (2003) was the winner of the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. Smith was the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writers Award in 2004 and a Whiting Award in 2005.

Susan Stewart

"The Ruins Lesson"

Welles-Brown Room,
Rush Rhees Library

5 Mar 2012, 5:00 pm

Susan Stewart's most recent books of poetry are Red Rover (2008), which appeared in 2011 in Italian translation from Jaca Books, Milan; Columbarium, which won the 2003 National Book Critics Circle award, and The Forest (1995). Her translation, Love Lessons: Selected Poems of Alda Merini, appeared in 2009 with Princeton University Press, and in 2012 she will publish two co-translations with the University of Chicago Press: with Sara Teardo, Laudomia Bonanni's novel The Reprisal, and, with Patrizio Ceccagnoli, the most recent two books of poetry by Milo De Angelis—Theme of Farewell and After-Poems. She also has translated Euripides' Andromache with Wesley Smith and the poetry and selected prose of the Scuola Romana painter Scipione with Brunella Antomarini. Her song cycle, "Songs for Adam," commissioned by the Chicago Symphony with music by the composer James Primosch, had its world premiere with baritone Brian Mulligan and the CSO, Sir Andrew Davis conducting, in October 2009.

Her books of criticism include The Poet's Freedom: A Notebook on Making, forthcoming in late 2011 from the University of Chicago Press; Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, which won the Christian Gauss Award for Literary Criticism in 2003 from Phi Beta Kappa and the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in 2004; The Open Studio: Essays on Art and Aesthetics, a collection of her writings on contemporary art; and On Longing, Crimes of Writing, and Nonsense. A former MacArthur Fellow, Stewart recently served as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005, and in the Spring of 2009 she received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Nigel Maister

Dramatic Reading: Hyam Plutzik's Horatio

Welles-Brown Room,
Rush Rhees Library

26 Mar 2012, 5:00 pm

Nigel Maister is the artistic director of the University of Rochester's International Theatre Program and a director, writer, designer, and performer. Recent and noteworthy theater productions include Peter Handke's The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other; King Lear; The Winter's Tale; Michael John Lachiusa's Hello Again; his own multimedia adaptations of The Iliad, Fo's Accidental Death of an Anarchist, and Gorki's The Lower Depths; the world premieres of W. David Hancock's The Puzzle Locker and Andy Bragen's The Hairy Dutchman; the New York premiere of Manfred Karge's Conquest of the South Pole; and his own translation of Bernard-Marie Koltès's Roberto Zucco. He is a founding member of the acclaimed new music ensemble Alarm Will Sound (AWS), for whom he has staged numerous concerts at Columbia's Miller Theatre, The Kitchen, Carnegie Hall's Zankel Hall, Cal Performances, the Holland Festival, and elsewhere. Maister co-developed and directed AWS's 1969—a multimedia music-theater piece that has toured nationally and will be presented at the Eastman School of Music in 2013.

Maister will be developing, codesigning, and directing John Cage's Song Books for New York City's River to River Festival and for the Holland Festival in 2012. With AWS, he has also performed his own text, Paper Trails (music by Stefan Freund) at the John Adams-curated In Your Ear Festival. Other recent performance credits include Rzewski's Coming Together. A Drama League Fall Directing Fellow, he also worked for two seasons as a staff director at Glimmerglass Opera. Additionally, he has been an assistant to and actor for the late Giorgio Strehler at Il Piccolo Teatro di Milano and interned with Richard Foreman and Peter Sellars (among others).

Philip Levine

Hubbell Auditorium,
141 Hutchison Hall

12 Apr 2012, 5:00 pm

Video Recording

Philip Levine is the eighteenth U.S. Poet Laureate. Upon his appointment for 2011-12, Librarian of Congress James H. Billington said in a statement, "Philip Levine is one of America's great narrative poets. His plainspoken lyricism has, for half a century, championed the art of telling 'The Simple Truth.'"

Levine "is a large, ironic Whitman of the industrial heartland" who, according to Edward Hirsch in the New York Times Book Review, should be considered "one of [America's] . . . quintessentially urban poets." He was born in 1928 to Russian-Jewish immigrants in Detroit, a city that inspired much of his writing. Author of twenty collections of poetry, his most recent is News of the World (Knopf, 2009). The Simple Truth won the Pulitzer Prize in 1995. What Work Is won the National Book Award in 1991.

David Baker of Kenyon Review writes, "What Work Is may be one of the most important books of poetry of our time. Poem after poem confronts the terribly damaged conditions of American labor, whose circumstance has perhaps never been more wrecked." Levine is known as the poet of the working class, and he remains dedicated to writing poetry "for people for whom there is no poetry."

Rosanna Warren

"Poetry and Translation"

Welles-Brown Room,
Rush Rhees Library

24 Apr 2012, 5:00 pm

Rosanna Warren is the author of one chapbook of poems (Snow Day, Palaemon Press, 1981), and four collections of poems: Each Leaf Shines Separate (Norton, 1984), Stained Glass (Norton, 1993), Departure (Norton, 2003), and Ghost in a Red Hat (Norton, March 2011). Fables of the Self: Studies in Lyric Poetry, a book of literary criticism, appeared from Norton in 2008. She edited and contributed to The Art of Translation: Voices from the Field (Northeastern, 1989) and has edited three chapbooks of poetry by prisoners. With Stephen Scully, she translated Euripides' Suppliant Women for Oxford University Press (1992). She has won fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, ACLS, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Lila Wallace Readers' Digest Fund, and the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, among others. Stained Glass won the Lamont Poetry Award from the Academy of American Poets. She has won the Witter Bynner Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Lavan Younger Poets' Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and the Award of Merit in Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2004. She was a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1999 to 2005, and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She teaches Comparative Literature at Boston University.

Yusef Komunyakaa

Welles-Brown Room,
Rush Rhees Library

13 Oct 2011, 5:00 pm

Born in Bogalusa, Louisiana in 1947, where he was raised during the beginning of the Civil Rights movement, Yusef Komunyakaa served in the United States Army from 1969 to 1970 as a correspondent, and as managing editor of the Southern Cross during the Vietnam War, earning him a Bronze Star. He first received wide recognition as a poet following the 1984 publication of Copacetic, a collection of poems built from colloquial speech which demonstrated his incorporation of jazz influences. He followed the book with two others: I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head (1986), winner of the San Francisco Poetry Center Award; and Dien Cai Dau (1988), which won the Dark Room Poetry Prize and has been cited by poets such as William Matthews and Robert Hass as being among the best writing on the war in Vietnam.

Since then, he has published several books of poems, including most recently The Chameleon Couch (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011); Pleasure Dome: New & Collected Poems, 1975-1999 (2001); Thieves of Paradise (1998), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Neon Vernacular: New & Selected Poems 1977-1989, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award in 1995. Komunyakaa is the recipient of the 2011 Wallace Stevens Award and was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 1999. He lives in New York City where he is currently Distinguished Senior Poet in New York University's graduate creative writing program.

MELIORA WEEKEND

Jennifer Grotz
James Longenbach
Stephen Schottenfeld
Joanna Scott

Lander Auditorium,
Hutchison Hall

22 Oct 2011, 3:30-5:00 pm

Jennifer Grotz is the author of The Needle (Houghton Mifflin, 2011) and Cusp (2003), winner of the Bakeless Prize and the Texas Institute of Letters Best First Book Award. Her poems, essays, reviews, and translations appear widely in journals and anthologies. She also serves as the Assistant Director of the Bread Loaf Writers Conference.

James Longenbach is the author of four books of poems, most recently The Iron Key (W. W. Norton) and Draft of a Letter (Chicago). He also writes about poetry, and his two most recent books of prose are The Art of the Poetic Line (Graywolf) and The Resistance to Poetry (Chicago). His poems and reviews appear frequently in such magazines as The Nation, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Book Review. He is the Joseph H. Gilmore Professor of English at the University of Rochester.

Stephen Schottenfeld has completed a story collection, Miss Ellen Jameson Is Not Deceased, and is currently writing a novel set in Memphis. His stories have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, TriQuarterly, StoryQuarterly, Virginia Quarterly Review, New England Review, The Iowa Review, and other literary magazines, and have garnered a Michener/Copernicus Society of America grant and special mentions in both the Pushcart Prize and Best American Short Stories anthologies.

Joanna Scott is the author of eight novels, including Follow Me, Liberation, Tourmaline, Make Believe, The Manikin, and Arrogance, and two collections of short fiction, Various Antidotes and Everybody Loves Somebody. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, Harpers, Esquire, Conjunctions, Black Clock, Subtropics, and other journals. She has reviewed for The New York Times, The Nation, and The Los Angeles Times. Her books have been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, the PEN-Faulkner, and the LA Times Book Award. Awards include a MacArthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Ambassador Book Award from the English-Speaking Union, and the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is the Roswell Smith Burrows Professor of English at the University of Rochester.

Eavan Boland

Hawkins-Carlson Room,
Rush Rhees Library

10 Nov 2011, 5:00 pm

Eavan Boland, professor and poet, was born in Dublin, Ireland, and educated in London, New York, and Dublin. She is Bella Mabury and Eloise Mabury Knapp Professor in Humanities and Melvin and Bill Lane Professor for the Director of Creative Writing at Stanford.

Her books of poetry include Against Love Poetry, which was a New York Times notable book of 2001, The Lost Land, An Origin Like Water: Collected Poems 1967-1987, In a Time of Violence, Outside History: Selected Poems 1980-1990, and most recently, in 2008, New Collected Poems.

Christopher Ricks

"T. S. Eliot and the Auditory Imagination"

Welles-Brown Room,
Rush Rhees Library

30 Nov 2011, 5:00 pm

Christopher Ricks is Professor of the Humanities, and Co-Director of the Editorial Institute, at Boston University, having previously taught at Oxford, Bristol, and Cambridge. He was the Professor of Poetry at Oxford, 2004-2009. His talk on "T. S. Eliot and the Auditory Imagination" is cognate with his books T. S. Eliot and Prejudice; Decisions and Revisions in T. S. Eliot; and True Friendship: Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht, and Robert Lowell under the sign of Eliot and Pound. He edited T. S. Eliot: Inventions of the March Hare, and (with Jim McCue) is co-editing The Poems of T. S. Eliot, a complete critical edition with full textual and contextual notes.

Stacey D'Erasmo

Welles-Brown Room,
Rush Rhees Library

24 Mar 2011, 5:00 pm

Stacey D'Erasmo is the author of the novels Tea, A Seahorse Year, and The Sky Below. She is the recipient of a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction. Her essays, features, and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Boston Review, Bookforum, and Ploughshares, among other publications. She is an assistant professor of writing at Columbia University. In the spring of 2011, she will be in residence at the American Academy in Rome as the 2010-11 Sovern/Columbia Affiliated Fellow.

Daniel Mendelsohn

Welles-Brown Room,
Rush Rhees Library

6 Apr 2011, 5:00 pm

Daniel Mendelsohn is a New York Times-bestselling author and award-winning critic, named by The Economist as one of the best critics writing in the English language today. His essays and reviews appear in numerous national publications, including the New Yorker, The New York Times, and The New York Review of Books. His six books include the memoir The Elusive Embrace, a New York Times Notable Book of 1999 and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year; a scholarly study of Euripidean drama; and the acclaimed two-volume translation of the complete works of C. P. Cavafy, a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2009. His international bestseller The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Jewish Book Award in the U.S. and the Prix Médicis in France, among many other honors, has been published in over fifteen countries, with over half a million copies in print. His other honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the NBCC Prize for Book Reviewing, and the George Jean Nathan Prize for Drama Criticism. He lives in New York City and in New Jersey.

Jennifer Grotz

Welles-Brown Room,
Rush Rhees Library

21 April 2011, 5:00 pm

Jennifer Grotz is the author of two books of poetry: The Needle, forthcoming in spring 2011, and Cusp, chosen by Yusef Komunyakaa as winner of the Bakeless Prize in 2003. Her poems and translations from the French and Polish appear widely in journals such as American Poetry Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, and anthologies such as Best American Poetry. She teaches at the University of Rochester and also serves as the Assistant Director of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference.

MELIORA WEEKEND

Adam Zagajewski

Lander Auditorium,
Hutchison Hall

16 Oct 2010, 3:30 pm

Adam Zagajewski was born in Lvov in 1945, a largely Polish city that became a part of the Soviet Ukraine shortly after his birth. His ethnic Polish family, which had lived for centuries in Lvov, was then forcibly repatriated to Poland. A major figure of the Polish New Wave literary movement of the early 1970s and of the anti-Communist Solidarity movement of the 1980s, Zagajewski is today one of the most well-known and highly regarded contemporary Polish poets in Europe and the United States. His luminous, searching poems are imbued with a deep engagement with history, art, and life. He enjoys a wide international readership, and his poetry survives translation with unusual power.

Zagajewski's most recent books in English are Eternal Enemies (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2008) and Without End: New and Selected Poems (2002), which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. Zagajewski's other collections of poetry include Mysticism for Beginners (1999), Canvas (1991), and Tremor: Selected Poems (1985). He is also the author of a book of essays and literary sketches, Two Cities: On Exile, History and the Imagination (1995), and of Solidarity, Solitude: Essays.

James Longenbach

Welles-Brown Room,
Rush Rhees Library

27 Oct 2010, 5:00 pm

James Longenbach is the Joseph H. Gilmore Professor of English at the University of Rochester, where he has won a Goergen Award for excellence in teaching and twice been selected Professor of the Year by the Student Association. His poems and his reviews of contemporary poetry appear regularly in The Nation, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Book Review, and the most recent of his many books are Draft of a Letter (Chicago) and The Art of the Poetic Line (Graywolf). This fall, W. W. Norton will publish his fourth collection of poems, The Iron Key.

Kevin Brockmeier

Welles-Brown Room,
Rush Rhees Library

11 Nov 2010, 5:00 pm

Kevin Brockmeier is the author of the novels The Brief History of the Dead and The Truth about Celia, the children's novels City of Names and Grooves: A Kind of Mystery, and the story collections Things That Fall from the Sky and The View from the Seventh Layer. His new novel, The Illumination, is forthcoming in February 2011. His work has been translated into fifteen languages, and he has published his stories in such venues as The New Yorker, The Georgia Review, McSweeney's, Zoetrope, Tin House, The Oxford American, The Best American Short Stories, The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, and New Stories from the South. He has received the Borders Original Voices Award, three O. Henry Awards (one, a first prize), the PEN USA Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, and an NEA grant. Recently he was named one of Granta magazine's Best Young American Novelists. He lives in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he was raised.

Steve Erickson

Welles-Brown Room,
Rush Rhees Library

23 Mar 2010, 5:00 pm

Steve Erickson is the author of eight novels—including Zeroville and Our Ecstatic Days—as well as two books about American politics and popular culture that have been published in ten languages around the world. Currently he is the editor of the literary journal Black Clock and teaches at the California Institute of the Arts. He received a Guggenheim fellowship in 2007. His website is SteveErickson.org.

C. Dale Young

Welles-Brown Room,
Rush Rhees Library

14 Apr 2010, 5:00 pm

C. Dale Young is the author of three books of poetry: The Day Underneath the Day (Northwestern 2001), The Second Person (Four Way Books 2007), and TORN (Four Way Books, forthcoming 2012). He practices medicine full-time, serves as poetry editor of the New England Review, and teaches in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. He is a former recipient of the Grolier Prize and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Yaddo, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, Paris Review, POETRY, and in many anthologies, including Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation, Legitimate Dangers, and two installments of The Best American Poetry. He lives in San Francisco.

MELIORA WEEKEND

Jennifer Grotz
James Longenbach
Stephen Schottenfeld
Joanna Scott

Lander Auditorium,
Hutchison Hall

10 Oct 2009, 4:15 pm

Jennifer Grotz, who joins the University of Rochester's creative writing faculty this year, is the author of Cusp (Houghton Mifflin, 2003). Her poems, reviews, and translations from the French and Polish have appeared widely in journals and anthologies such as Ploughshares, New England Review, American Poetry Review, and The Best American Poetry. She is also the assistant director of the Bread Loaf Writers Conference.

James Longenbach, who has taught creative writing at the University of Rochester since 1985, is the author of four books of poems, most recently Draft of a Letter (Chicago, 2007) and the forthcoming Island. He is also the author of several critical works, most recently The Resistance to Poetry (Chicago, 2004) and The Art of the Poetic Line (Graywolf, 2008), and his poems and reviews of contemporary poetry appear regularly in The New Yorker and The New York Times Book Review.

Stephen Schottenfeld, who joined the University of Rochester's creative writing faculty last year, has completed a story collection, Miss Ellen Jameson Is Not Deceased, and is currently writing a novel set in Memphis. His stories have appeared in TriQuarterly, StoryQuarterly, Virginia Quarterly Review, New England Review, The Iowa Review, and other literary magazines, and have garnered a Michener/Copernicus Society of America grant and special mentions in both the Pushcart Prize and Best American Short Stories anthologies.

Joanna Scott has taught creative writing at the University of Rochester since 1988. Character and the motion of thought; the effects of varied narrative form; contradictory perceptions of time and place; the idiosyncracies of voice; mystery and the impact of disclosure; beauty and ugliness; comedy, temptation, collapse, and recovery; the elusive potential of imagination—these are some of the subjects that Joanna Scott explores in her novels and stories. Modern and contemporary authors she has written about include Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf, W.G. Sebald, Maureen Howard, William Gass, and J.M. Coetzee. Her latest novel, Follow Me, was published in 2009.

Tony Hoagland

Welles-Brown Room,
Rush Rhees Library

22 Oct 2009, 5:00 pm

Tony Hoagland's chapbook, Hard Rain, was published by Hollyridge Press in 2005. His other collections of poetry include What Narcissism Means to Me (Graywolf Press, 2003), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Donkey Gospel (1998), which received the James Laughlin Award; and Sweet Ruin (1992), chosen by Donald Justice for the 1992 Brittingham Prize in Poetry and winner of the Zacharis Award from Emerson College. Hoagland's honors include two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the Poetry Foundation's 2005 Mark Twain Award in recognition of his contribution to humor in American poetry. His poems and critical writings have appeared in such publications as Ploughshares, Agni, Threepenny Review, Gettysburg Review, American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, and the 1991 Pushcart Prize anthology. He currently teaches at the University of Houston and Warren Wilson College.

ZZ Packer

Welles-Brown Room,
Rush Rhees Library

10 Nov 2009, 5:00 pm

ZZ Packer attended Yale University, where she received a B.A. in 1994. Her graduate work included an M.A. at Johns Hopkins University in 1995 and an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop of the University of Iowa in 1999. She was named a Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University.

Her collection Drinking Coffee Elsewhere (Riverhead Books, 2003) was published to considerable acclaim. The book was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, a New York Times Notable Book, and personally selected by John Updike for the Today Show Book Club. In 2005, she was awarded the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction. She was the Lurie Distinguished Visiting Professor of Creative Writing (joining the ranks of Simon Winchester, Ishmael Reed, James D. Houston, Molly Giles, Ursula Le Guin, James Kelman, Al Young, Sandra M. Gilbert, and Carolyn Kizer) at San Jose State University during the spring 2008 semester. She is on the faculty of California College of the Arts, where she serves as senior visiting professor of creative writing. She lives in Pacifica, California, and is currently at work on a novel set in the aftermath of the Civil War.

Mary Gaitskill

Welles-Brown Room,
Rush Rhees Library

2 Mar 2009, 8:00 pm

Mary Gaitskill is the author of the novels Two Girls, Fat and Thin, and Veronica, as well as the story collections Bad Behavior and Because They Wanted To, which was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner in 1998. Her story “Secretary” was the basis for the feature film of the same name. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. In 2002 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction. Her novel Veronica was nominated for the National Book Award in 2005; it was also nominated for the National Critic’s Circle Award and the L.A. Times Book Award.

Her new story collection will be appearing in March 2009. She has taught as a guest lecturer or a Writer-In-Residence at Hollins College, UC-Berkeley, the University of Houston, New York University, The New School, and Brown. She was an Associate Professor at Syracuse until lastyear.

Frank Bidart

Welles-Brown Room,
Rush Rhees Library

23 Mar 2009, 8:00 pm

Frank Bidart was born in Bakersfield, California, in 1939 and educated at the University of California at Riverside and at Harvard University. His early books are collected in In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965-90 (1990). His recent volumes include Watching the Spring Festival (2008), Star Dust (2005), Music Like Dirt (2002), and Desire (1997), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critic's Circle Award. He is also the co-editor of Robert Lowell's Collected Poems (2003). Bidart’s honors include the Wallace Stevens Award, the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Foundation Writer's Award, the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Shelley Award of the Poetry Society of America, and The Paris Review's first Bernard F. Conners Prize for "The War of Vaslav Nijinsky." In 2007, he received the Bollingen Prize in American Poetry. Bidart was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2003. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he has taught at Wellesley College since 1972.

Anthony Doerr

Welles-Brown Room,
Rush Rhees Library

8 Apr 2009, 8:00 pm

Anthony Doerr is the author of three books, The Shell Collector, About Grace, and Four Seasons in Rome. Doerr’s short fiction has won three O. Henry Prizes and has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, and The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Fiction. He has won the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, the Rome Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, and the Ohioana Book Award twice. His books have been a New York Times Notable Book, an American Library Association Book of the Year, a "Book of the Year" in the Washington Post, and a finalist for the PEN USA fiction award. In 2007, the British literary magazine Granta placed Doerr on its list of 21 Best Young American novelists. Doerr lives in Boise, Idaho, with his wife and two sons. He currently teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Warren Wilson College. From 2007 to 2010, he will be the Writer-in-Residence for the State of Idaho.

Susan Stewart

Welles-Brown Room,
Rush Rhees Library

25 Sep 2008, 8:00 pm

Poet and critic Susan Stewart was born in 1952. She received a B.A. in English and anthropology from Dickinson College, an M.A. in poetics from Johns Hopkins University, and a Ph.D. in folklore from the University of Pennsylvania.

She is the author of several collections of poetry, including Columbarium (2003), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award; The Forest (1995), which received the Literary Award of the Philadelphia Atheneum; The Hive (1987); and Yellow Stars and Ice (1981).

Her collected essays on art, The Open Studio: Essays in Art and Aesthetics, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2004. She also co-translated Euripides' Andromache with Wesley Smith, and the poetry and selected prose of the Scuola Romana painter Scipione with Brunella Antomarini, and collaborated with composer James Primosch on a song cycle commissioned by the Chicago Symphony.

About her work, the poet and critic Allen Grossman has written, "Stewart has built a poetic syntax capable of conveying an utterly singular account of consciousness, by the light of which it is possible to see the structure of the human world with a new clarity and an unforseen precision, possible only in her presence and by means of her art."

Her honors include a Lila Wallace Individual Writer's Award, two grants in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Pew Fellowship for the Arts, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation.

Stewart taught at Temple University in Philadelphia from 1978 to 1997. She is currently Professor of English at Princeton University where she teaches the history of poetry and aesthetics. She was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2005.

MELIORA WEEKEND

Jonathan Franzen

Hoyt Auditorium,
Hoyt Hall

18 Oct 2008, 3:30 pm

When The Corrections was published in the fall of 2001, Jonathan Franzen was probably better known for his nonfiction than for the two novels he had already published. In an essay he wrote for Harper's in 1996, Franzen lamented the declining cultural authority of the American novel and described his personal search for reasons to persist as a fiction writer. "The novelist has more and more to say to readers who have less and less time to read," he wrote. "Where to find the energy to engage with a culture in crisis when the crisis consists in the impossibility of engaging with the culture?"

Five years after publishing the Harper's essay, Franzen became fully engaged with his culture. The Corrections was an enormous international bestseller, with translations in 35 languages, American hardcover sales of nearly one million copies and nominations for nearly every major book prize in the country – Franzen was awarded the National Book Award for this novel.

Jonathan Franzen's first novel, The Twenty-Seventh City (1988), was a reimagination of his hometown, St. Louis, through the eyes of conspirators and terrorists from southern Asia. His second novel, Strong Motion (1992), was a thriller-cum-love-story set in the student slums of Boston. Both books displayed Franzen's ability to connect the personal and the political, the emotional and the social, in compelling and richly textured narratives.

Born in Western Springs, Illinois, in 1959, Jonathan Franzen grew up in Webster Groves, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis. After graduating from Swarthmore College in 1981 he studied in Berlin as a Fulbright scholar and later worked in a seismology lab at Harvard. Franzen is also the author of a bestselling collection of essays, How to Be Alone and the memoir The Discomfort Zone. He recently published a new English translation of the play Spring Awakening by Frank Wedekind. His short stories and his essays, including political journalism, have most recently appeared in The New Yorker, The Best American Essays, The New York Times, and The Guardian.

Edward Hirsch

Welles-Brown Room,
Rush Rhees Library

12 Nov 2008, 8:00 pm

Edward Hirsch was born in Chicago in 1950 and educated both at Grinnell College and the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a Ph.D. in folklore.

His first collection of poems, For the Sleepwalkers, was published in 1981 and went on to receive the Lavan Younger Poets Award from The Academy of American Poets and the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award from New York University. His second collection, Wild Gratitude (1986), received the National Book Critics Circle Award. Since then, he has published four books of poems, most recently Lay Back the Darkness (2003); On Love (1998); Earthly Measures (1994); and The Night Parade (1989).

He is also the author of the prose volumes The Demon and the Angel: Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration (2002); Responsive Reading (1999); and the national bestseller How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (1999), which the poet Garrett Hongo called "the product of a lifetime of passionate reflection" and "a wonderful book for laureate and layman both." Most recently, he published Poet's Choice (2007), which collects two years' worth of his weekly essay-letters running in the Washington Post Book World.

Hirsch has received fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, an Academy of Arts and Letters Award, and a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award. He has been a professor of English at Wayne State University and the University of Houston. Hirsch is currently the president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

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.

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 Dec 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.