2016-17 Reading Series
Stuart Dybek
Wednesday | Oct. 5, 2016 | 7:30 p.m. | Music Room, Goodhart Hall
Stuart Dybek is the author of two poetry collections and five books of fiction— including the collections Paper Lantern and Ecstatic Cahoots. The winner of the PEN/Malamud prize for short fiction, his stories have appeared in The O. Henry Prize Stories and The Best American Short Stories, and in The New Yorker, The Atlantic and Harper’s. In The New York Times Book Review, Darin Strauss writes that Dybek’s “two new collections establish him as not only our most relevant writer, but maybe our best.” Dybek is also the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Grant.
Edwidge Danticat
Wednesday | Oct. 26, 2016 | 7:30 p.m. | McPherson Auditorium, Goodhart Hall
Novelist and short story writer Edwidge Danticat is the author of seven books of fiction, including the novel Claire of the Sea Light. A two-time finalist for the National Book Award, her memoir, Brother, I’m Dying, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Writing in The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani says, “It is a measure of Danticat’s fierce, elliptical artistry that she makes the elisions count as much as her piercing, indelible words.” Danticat has been the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Grant and the Story Prize, and her work appears regularly in The New Yorker and The New York Times.
Carl Phillips
Wednesday | Nov. 30, 2016 | 7:30 p.m. | Music Room, Goodhart Hall
Carl Phillips is the author of 13 books of poetry, including Tether, winner of the 2001 Kingsley Tufts Award. Writing in The New Yorker, poet and critic Dan Chiasson says, “I have a candidate for the author of the most interesting contemporary English sentences: the American poet Carl Phillips…His style has been remarkably consistent from volume to volume, upsetting our easy assumption that great artists evohis reading was made possible with the slve from phase to phase.” Phillips has twice been a finalist for the National Book Award.
This reading was made possible with the support of the Jane Flanders Fund and the Marianne Moore Fund for the Study of Poetry.
Dana Spiotta
Wednesday | Feb. 22, 2017 | 7:30 p.m. | Music Room, Goodhart Hall
Dana Spiotta is the author of four novels, including Innocents and Others. A frequent contributor to The New Yorker, her second book, Eat the Document, was a finalist for the National Book Award. In The New York Times, critic Michiko Kakutani says, “Identity—and the very American belief that individuals can invent or reinvent themselves anew here—is the bright thread that runs through the work of this immensely talented novelist.”
Joy Harjo
Wednesday | March 29, 2017 | 7:30 p.m. | Music Room, Goodhart Hall
Poet Joy Harjo is the author of eight books of poetry, including Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings. She has won a Guggenheim Fellowship, the American Indian Distinguished Achievement in the Arts Award, and the Wallace Stevens Award for lifetime achievement in poetry. Poet Adrienne Rich wrote of her work, “I turn and return to Harjo’s poetry for her breathtaking complex witness and for her worldremaking language: precise, unsentimental, miraculous.”
This reading was made possible with the support of the Jane Flanders Fund and the Marianne Moore Fund for the Study of Poetry.
Ben Marcus
Wednesday | April 12, 2017 | 7:30 p.m. | Ely Room, Wyndham Alumnae House
Ben Marcus is the author of four acclaimed novels and the short story collection, Leaving the Sea. Novelist Jonathan Safran Foer says Marcus is “that rarest kind of writer: a necessary one. It’s become impossible to imagine the literary world—the world itself—without his daring, mind-bending and heartbreaking writing.” Marcus has won a Whiting Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Maggie Nelson
Wednesday | April 26, 2017 | 7:30 p.m. | Hepburn Teaching Theater, Goodhart Hall
Maggie Nelson is the author of three books of poetry, and the nonfiction The Argonauts, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. In The Washington Post, Michael Lindgren says, “Nelson is so outrageously gifted a writer and thinker she seems to operate in some astral dimension where the rules of normal physics have been suspended. Her book is an elegant, powerful, deeply discursive examination of gender, sexuality, queerness, pregnancy and motherhood, intellectually potent and poetically expressive.”
This reading was made possible with the support of the Jane Flanders Fund and the Marianne Moore Fund for the Study of Poetry.