Spring 2007 Events
The Amherst College Center for Creative
Writing is delighted to invite you to our fiction readings.
All events are free, wheelchair-accessible, and open to the public, and will be followed by
refreshments.
For more information, please call 542-8200 or visit the website of Amherst
Books.
Michael Collier
February 15, Thursday, 8 pm
Pruyne Lecture Hall
Michael Collier is the author of five books of poems, including The Ledge, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. The Washington Post called his most recent, Dark, Wild Realm, an “elegant, accessible, closely observed” collection that “seeks the unstable spaces between light and shadow, waking and sleep, spirit and body, and the places where the living and dead pass one another.”
Olga Grushin
February 19, Monday, 8 pm
Pruyne Lecture Hall
Born in Moscow and raised in Prague, Olga Grushin now lives in Washington DC, where she writes her widely published short fiction. The Dream Life of Sukhanov, her first novel—written in English, her third language—has been praised as a “haunting dreamscape of her native land […] to be cheered here, there and everywhere,” (Atlanta Journal-Constitution) and “Gogolesque in its sardonic humor.” (The New York Times).
Chris Adrian
February 28, Wednesday, 8 pm
Amherst Books
In his new novel, The Children’s Hospital, a hospital is preserved, afloat, after the earth is flooded beneath seven miles of water. “Chris Adrian is truly brilliant,” writes Nathan Englander. “I’m not saying this because he’s a writer, and a pediatrician, and now in divinity school. I simply believe him to be a person with a unique way of processing the world around him and the ability to communicate that vision back to us in what is often a startlingly beautiful manner.”
Brian Morton
March 12, Monday, 8 pm
Pruyne Lecture Hall
The New Yorker called Brian Morton’s recent Breakable You, “Ferociously moving” and elaborated: “This packed novel about the vagaries of love and grief takes place in a New York straight out of Woody Allen: enormous apartments abound, and girls in bars say things like ‘Paul Auster makes me wet.’” Brian Morton is the author of three other novels: The Dylanist, A Window Across the River, and Starting Out in the Evening, the film version of which premiered at Sundance in January.
Claire Messud
April 12, Thursday, 8 pm
Pruyne Lecture Hall
Two of her three previous books were PEN/Faulkner finalists, all were New York Times Notable Books, and Claire Messud has been described as a writer “of near-miraculous perfection” (The New York Times Book Review). Now The Village Voice calls her latest, The Emperor’s Children, “A gripping story of clashing ambitions, compromised loyalties, and the love/hate relationship between the powerless and the powerful. […T]he narrative goes beyond social satire, deepening into a hypnotic, moving read.”
Daniel Hall
April 16, Monday, 8 pm
Alumni House
Daniel Hall’s first book, Hermit with Landscape, was chosen by James Merrill for the Yale Series of Younger Poets, and his second, Strange Relation, was selected for The National Poetry Series. Of his newest, Under Sleep, Richard Wilbur praises the collection’s “rich account of consciousness and of the density of any experience,” and Stephen Yenser calls it a “splendid new book, at once so sad, witty, and exquisitely made.” Hall is currently the writer-in-residence at Amherst College.
John Hennessy
April 26, Thursday, 8 pm
Amherst Books
Daniel Hall writes of the poet’s new collection, Bridge and Tunnel, a gritty rhapsody to a New Jersey childhood: “Whether he is […] grappling with his mother's bizarre cosmology, or explaining mortality to his young son,Hennessy's music recalls the wild delirium of a Klezmer band. This startling new voice is really a houseful of voices, sage and seductive, heartbreaking and hilarious by turns.” Hennessy’s poems have been widely published, and he currently teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Fall 2006
Katherine Min '80
Wednesday, October 18, 8:00 p.m.
Amherst Books (8 Main Street)
Min, author of widely anthologized and Pushcart Prize-winning short stories, will read from her debut novel, Secondhand World. John Dalton has said of the book, “What makes this novel so memorable-and hard to put down-is the realness and urgency of its emotion. It's a force that commands the reader from one aching and beautifully concise chapter to the next. [It] is both powerful and intimate and offers us a piercing, new view of immigrant isolation.”
"[A] haunting debut . . . Swirling, textured, beautifully detailed . . .
Min's rendering of an outsider family's tight-knit alienation is spot-on." -Publishers Weekly
Alexander Chee
and
Judith Frank
Thursday,
October 26, 8:00 p.m.
Pruyne Lecture Hall (Fayerweather 115)
Lambda-Award-winning writers and Amherst College faculty Chee and Frank will read from works in progress. Chee, Visting Writer and author of the highly acclaimed Edinburgh, is currently finishing Queen of the Night in which a 19th Century opera singer has vowed to sing but never speak, and believes her roles curse her to repeat the fates of her characters. Frank, Professor of English and author of the highly acclaimed Crybaby Butch, will read from her novel-in-progress, Noah's Ark, which centers upon a gay American couple that inherits two small children in the wake of a café bombing in Jerusalem that kills their parents.
“Judith Frank creates a deeply human, bravely unsentimental story while at the same time investigating the meaning of butch identity as it reinvents itself from one generation to the next.” -Carol Anshaw
"Alexander Chee is the best new novelist I've seen in some time.” –Edmund White
Lorrie Moore
Friday,
November 3, 8:00 p.m.
Pruyne Lecture Hall (Fayerweather 115)
“From the very start, Lorrie Moore’s generous gifts as a writer have been clear: a wry, distinctive voice, a gift for the telling detail,” writes Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times—and it’s a feeling shared by the many and exuberant fans of this widely published novelist and short-story writer. Of one story collection, The New York Times Book Review wrote, “Birds of America […] will stand by itself as one of our funniest, most telling anatomies of human love and vulnerability.”
“[I]t's important to remember that Moore, while fascinated almost exclusively with broken people, is among the very funniest writers alive.” –Dave Eggers
Catherine Ciepiela '83
Thursday, November 9, 8:00 p.m.
Amherst Books (8 Main Street)
In her new book, The Same Solitude, Ciepela studies the epistolary romance between modernist poets Marina Tsvetaeva and Boris Pasternak. Clare Cavanaugh praises the book’s “impeccable scholarship, theoretical acumen, and rich, resourceful close readings” and Honor Moore Ceipela’s “remarkable and moving work of criticism and biography.” Ciepiela is Associate Professor of Russian at Amherst College and co-editor of the forthcoming anthology The Stray Dog Cabaret: A Book of Russian Poems.
“Still, we have the same solitude, the same journeys and searching, and the same favorite turns in the labyrinth of literature and history.” Boris Pasternak to Marina Tsvetaeva
Katharine Weber
Tuesday,
November 14, 8:00 p.m.
Amherst Books (8 Main Street)
Weber is the author of the novels The Little Women, The Music Lesson, and Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear, all New York Times Notable Books. Of her latest, about the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire that killed 146 workers, Cynthia Ozick writes, “Triangle is a marvel of ingenuity, bridging history and imagination, astonishing musical inventiveness and genuine social tragedy. It is a wide-awake novel as powerful as it is persuasive, probing and capturing human verities. ”
“Here one of our most irresistible writers meets one of the most immovable events of our history. Triangle is an incandescent novel. ” —Madison Smartt Bell
Peter Covino '85
Thursday,
December 7, 8:00 p.m.
Pruyne Lecture Hall (Fayerweather 115)
Of Covino’s collection, Cut Off the Ears of Winter, W.S. DiPiero has said,“These poems are acts of discovery,” and Lynn Emanuel has called it “Restless, worldly, intelligent, and beautiful.” Covino’s chapbook, Straight Boyfriend, received the Frank O'Hara Prize in Poetry in 2001. Covino, born and raised in Italy, and teaches English and Creative Writing at the University of Rhode Island.
“Here are psalms against the sinister. Here, too, are eclogues of mercy.[…] This is a book of virtues better far than our deserving." —Donald Revell
Fall
2005 Events
John Kinsella
Tuesday, September 13th, 8:00 pm
Pruyne Lecture Hall (Fayerweather 115)
This
Australian poet, whom Harold Bloom has described as "astonishingly
fecund and inventive," is the author of more than twenty books
of poetry and prose. Of his most recent, a reworking of the pastoral
into The New Arcadia, J.D. McClatchy writes, "Kinsella
takes it all in with a naturalist's eye, and his view brims with enormous
sympathies and moral edge." Brian Henry concludes, " The
New Arcadia emerges as both protest and radical exaltation."
Co-sponsored by the Scott Turow Fund.
J.D. McClatchy
Thursday, October 13th, 8:00 pm
Amherst Books (poetry reading)
Friday, October 14th, 4:00 pm
Pruyne Lecture Hall ("The Writer's Desk," an
illustrated lecture sponsored by the Friends of the Amherst College
Library) followed by a reception at Robert Frost Library
J. D. McClatchy is the author of five books of poetry, including the
most recent Hazmat, a book about the capacity and treachery
of the flesh, which was nominated for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize. The Los
Angeles Times writes, of this tremendously celebrated poet: "Just
when we're despairing about the state of contemporary culture . . .
along comes a poet such as J. D. McClatchy to reassure us that the
highest, most refining principles are still at play... "
Co-sponsored by the Scott Turow Fund.
Charles C. Mann
Monday, October 17th, 8:00 pm
Pruyne Lecure Hall (Fayerweather 115)
Journalist Charles C. Mann's currently bestselling 1491 offers
a radical rethinking of the history of the Americas before Columbus
that the San Jose Mercury News describes as "part detective
story, part epic and part tragedy" and Jan Dizard has called "An
eye-opening book that requires us to rethink virtually every assumption
we have had about the Western Hemisphere before the arrival of Europeans." Mann
is a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly , Science ,
and Wired .
Co-sponsored by the Department of Sociology.
Susan Snively
Monday, October 24th, 8:00 pm
Alumni House
Local poet Susan Snively, the Director of the Writing Center at Amherst
College, is the author of four collections of poems. Of her new book,
William Pritchard writes, " Skeptic Traveler is a collection
graced by intelligence, wit, and also by a feeling heart. Susan Snively's
skepticism, whether exercised in traveling to other countries, to her
familial past, or to the nooks and crannies of a complicated present,
is a humane one..." Richard Wilbur described her work as "clean-cut,
fluent, witty, direct, full of personality and surprise. [She] can
also be deeply meditative, grave and affecting, uproarious."
Stephanie Grant
Wednesday November 2nd, 8:00 pm
Amherst Books (8 Main Street)
Stephanie Grant's first novel, The Passion of Alice, "a
smart, funny, wonderful book" ( Los Angeles Times Book Review) about
appetite and illness, was nominated for the Lambda Award for Best Lesbian
Fiction. Her new novel, Map of Ireland , is a contemporary
retelling of Huck Finn that places female sexuality and friendship
at the center of a foundational American myth. She is currently Writer-in-Residence
at Mount Holyoke College.
Sarah Schulman
Thursday, November 10th
Talk
4:30 pm
Pruyne Lecture Hall (Fayerweather 115)
Reading
7:00 pm
Studio 3, Webster Hall
Sarah Schulman is the award-winning author of eight
novels, including Rat Bohemia and After Delores, two
nonfiction books, including My American History: Lesbian and Gay
Life During the Reagan/Bush Years , and the plays Carson McCullers and Manic
Flight Reaction . She is the co-director of the ACT UP Oral History
Project and a Professor of English at the City University of New York.
Richard Todd
Monday, November 14th, 8 pm
Pruyne Lecture Hall (Fayerweather 115)
Richard Todd was executive editor of the Atlantic Monthly ,
and published books under his own imprint at Houghton Mifflin, where
his authors included Tracy Kidder and Ann Patchett. His essays and
cultural reportage have appeared in The Atlantic , Harper's , The
New York Times , and numerous other magazines. He is currently
completing a book, The Thing Itself, that mediates on the
problem of authenticity through such diverse phenomena as famous people,
sincerity, television, and memoir.
Co-sponsored by the Scott Turow Fund.
For more information, please call 542-8200.
Spring
2005 Events
Rachel
Hadas
Thursday, February 17, 8:00 pm
Pruyne Lecture Hall (Fayerweather 115)
The author of fifteen books of poetry, essays, and translations, Rachel Hadas
has been praised for her singular--but extraordinarily diverse--vision. J.D.
McClatchy writes: " The world's story and the margins of our lives have
rarely been so lovingly and clearly designed as they are in Hadas's poems." Grace
Schulman evokes her simultaneous preoccupations with the classical and the
current: "antiquity illuminates the present as Rachel Hadas finds in ordinary
human acts 'what never was and what is eternal.'"
(Co-sponsored by the Scott Turow Fund.)
To read a poem, please click here.
Luis
Urrea
Tuesday, February 22, 8:00 pm
Amherst Books (8 Main Street)
Luis Urrea is the critically acclaimed author of nine books of fiction, poetry,
memoir, and journalism. His most recent book, The Devil's Highway (2004),
is the best-selling account of a group of Mexican men who died while attempting
to cross the Sonoran desert into the United States in May 2001. The LA times
calls the story "nothing less than a saga on the scale of the Exodus and
an ordeal as heartbreaking as the Passion -- 'a savage gospel of the crossing,'
as Urrea puts it."
(Co-sponsored by the Scott Turow Fund.)
Katia Kapovich
Thursday, February 24, 4:30 pm
Amherst Russian Center (Webster, 2nd floor)
Bilingual poet Katia Kapovich writes in Russian and English. She
recently published a book of her poems in English, "Gogol in Rome" (Salt,
2004), and her poems have appeared in the London Review of Books, The
New Republic, Ploughshares, The Antioch Review, and others. About
this work, Billy Collins has said "she can sway effortlessly from
the most common detail into zones of sheer imaginative wonder." Kapovich's
Russian poetry has appeared in translation in several anthologies. The
Russian-born Kapovich belonged to a literary dissident movement, emigrated
from the USSR in 1990, and currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
where she co-edits "Fulcrum: an annual of poery and aesthetics."
This event is co-sponsored by the Russian Department, the Amherst Center for
Russian Culture, and the Creative Writing Program at Amherst College.
Jenny
Factor
Tuesday, March 1, 8:00 pm
Pruyne Lecture Hall (Fayerweather 115)
In her debut collection, Unraveling at the Name, poet Jenny Factor
turns her formal attention to such themes as motherhood, the dissolution of
a marriage, and sexual awakening. In nominating this brave, gritty, and transcendent
book for a Hayden Carruth Award--which it won--Marilyn Hacker wrote: "Here
is a new voice accomplished both in mind and music, a poet with perfect pitch
in her mother tongue." Factor was a finalist for the 2002 Lambda Literary
Award in Lesbian Poetry.
Read a poem here.
Five College Poetryfest
Wednesday, March 2, 7:30 pm
Mount Holyoke College, Abbey Interfaith Chapel
Poetry students from each of the five colleges will read from
their work. Amherst to be represented by our own fabulous David Molina
and Jesse McCarthy. Reception to follow.
Click here for
more information and to link to sample poems.
Lawrence
Douglas and Alex George
Monday, March 7, 8:00 pm
Pruyne Lecture Hall (Fayerweather 115)
Amherst College professors Douglas and George will read from Sense
and Nonsensibility: Lampoons of Learning and Literature , a collection
of satires and spoofs that poke fun at literary criticism, the educational
establishment and American culture. William H. Pritchard describes
the book as " both learned and extremely funny" while Anders
Henriksson calls the irreverent duo " Monty Python meets Immanuel
Kant ." Douglas and George contribute a regular column to The
Chronicle of Higher Education .
Visit the Nonsensibility
website.
A
Tribute to Richard Wilbur
Wednesday, April 6, 4:00 pm
Alumni House
In celebration of the publication of Richard Wilbur's Collected
Poems , a gathering of poets, teachers and students will read
and discuss favorite poem, followed by a reading by Wilbur himself.
One of his generation's finest poets, Wilbur has over a period of sixty
years produced a splendid, wide-ranging body of work: poems, translations,
essays, song lyrics and children's books. His many honors include two
Pulitzer Prizes and a National Book Award. Readers will include Anthony
Marx, professor of political science and president of Amherst College;
William H. Pritchard ’53, the Henry Clay Folger Professor of
English and author of Lives of the Modern Poets, among other
works of criticism; David Sofield, the Samuel Williston Professor of
English and the author of Light Disguise: Poems ; Andrew Parker,
professor of English; Susan Snively, associate dean of students, director
of the writing center, and the author of The Undertow , among
other books of poems; and Tess Taylor ’00, author of The
Misremembered World and currently a Copeland fellow at
Amherst College.
Wilbur is a1942 graduate of Amherst College, and his body of work encompasses
poems, translations, essays, song lyrics and children’s books. His previous
books of poetry include The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems (1947); Things
of This World (1956), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize and the
National Book Award; Walking to Sleep: New Poems and Translations (1969);
and New and Collected Poems (1988), also winner of the Pulitzer Prize.
(Co-sponsored by the Scott Turow Fund.)
Visit here for
biographical information, poems, and links.
Piotr Sommer
Thursday, April 7, 8:00
Amherst Books (8 Main Street)
John Ashbery describes Piotr Sommer as "the great poet
of 'everyday loneliness, contrary to your self, perhaps.'" A poet
and translator, Sommer is the author of eight books of poetry and two
books of essays. Of his newest collection, Continued, Madeline
Levine writes, "Deceptively simple, his poems contain a tension
between small moments--harmony with the world and a wry recognition
of inevitable loss." Sommer is currently a fellow at the Humanities
Center at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Read a poem here.
Catherine
Newman
Tuesday, April 12, 8:00 pm
Amherst Books (8 Main Street)
Of her memoir, Waiting for Birdy, Chris Bohjalian
writes, " Catherine Newman captures poignantly, powerfully, and
honestly that wondrous roller-coaster called parenting. Pure and simple,
this book is a laugh-out-loud gem." Claire Messud calls
the book " [f]rank, hilarious, sometimes agonizing and always
delicious." Newman is the author of the on-line column, "Bringing
Up Ben & Birdy" and her work has been published in numerous
magazines and books, including the New York Times bestselling The
Bitch in the House.
Read the column.
Tess
Taylor
Thursday, April 28, 8:00 pm
Fayerweather 117
Taylor, currently a Copeland Fellow at the College, graduated
from Amherst College with the class of 2000. Her chapbook of poems, The
Misremembered World , was selected by Eavan Boland for the Poetry
Society of American's inaugural Chapbook Fellowship Competition, and
was published in December 2003. She has won the Morton Marr poetry
prize from the Southwest Review and the Dorothy Sargent Memorial
Poetry Prize. Her poems and non-fiction have appeared in the Times
Literary Supplement, The New Yorker , and Literary Imagination.
Read a poem.
Fall
2004 Events
Elizabeth Alexander
Thursday, September 16, 8:00 PM
Amherst
Books, 8 Main Street
Arnold Rampersand has called Elizabeth
Alexander "one of the
brightest stars in our literary sky, a poet of poise and power." Alexander
is the author of three collections of poetry, including her most recent Antebellum
Dream Book, and a book of essays about race, art, and culture, The
Black Interior , in which she studies "black life and creativity
behind the face of stereotype and limited imagination." Alexander's
poems and essays have been widely anthologized and published in such
places as the Paris Review and The Village Voice ,
and she has lectured on African American art and culture across the
country and abroad for nearly two decades. She currently teaches in
the English and African American Studies Department at Yale University.
Click here for a more extensive bio.
Click here to hear Alexander read her poetry.
Click here to read excerpts from Body of Life.
Susan Stinson
Monday, September 20, 8:00 PM
Amherst Books, 8 Main Street
Marilyn Wann describes Susan Stinson's novel, Venus of Chalk, as
satisfying " like that first long breath after a good cry; like
a thorough spring cleaning; like a warm, clothing-optional hug." Her
t hree earlier books offer similar pleasures: as Alice
Sebold puts it, "Through an ardent faith in the written word,
Susan Stinson is a novelist who translates a mundane world into the
most poetic of possibilities." Her work, which has been
published in The Kenyon Review , The Seneca Review and The
Women's Review of Books , has received the Benjamin Franklin Award
in Fiction as well as a number of fellowships. Stinson lives in Northampton,
where she is currently at work on a novel about the eighteenth century
theologian and preacher, Jonathan Edwards.
Click here to read an excerpt from Venus of Chalk.
Click here to read reviews of Venus of Chalk.
May-lee Chai
Monday, September 27, 8:00 PM
Pruyne Lecture Hall (Fayerweather 115), Amherst College
Of Glamorous Asians, May-lee Chai's forthcoming
collection of stories and essays , Marilyn Krysl has remarked, " We're
in the hands of a sophisticate with a piercing eye, a nuanced intelligence
and a sprightly sense of irony." Chai's earlier work earned similar
praise: her first novel, My Lucky Face, an intimate investigation
of China's cultural revolution, was called, "beautifully told." Her
second book, The Girl from Purple Mountain, a family memoir
that Chai co-wrote with her father, was nominated for a National Book
Award in 2001. Chai's fiction and essays have been widely published
in such places as the San Francisco Chronicle, ZYZZYVA, and Missouri
Review. She is currently the Visiting Writer at Amherst College's
Creative Writing Center.
Click here to read about Glamorous Asians.
Click here to read more about My Lucky Face.
Dan Chiasson
Thursday, October 21, 8:00 PM
Pruyne Lecture Hall (Fayerweather 115), Amherst College
The
University of Chicago Press waxes poetic about Dan Chiasson's debut
poetry collection : "Both intensely personal and deeply
rooted in recognizable events of personal, familial, or national
significance, The
Afterlife of Objects is a kind of dreamed autobiography." They're
not alone in their admiration: the book was named a "notable book" by
the New Yorker and called "a superb first book" by The
Washington Post . Chiasson received a Pushcart Prize
as well, and his work has been published in Slate and Ploughshares ,
among other places. A 1993 graduate of Amherst College, Chiasson
received his Ph.D. from Harvard University, and is currently Assistant
Professor of English at Stony Brook University, where he directs the
Poetry Center.
Chris Bohjalian
Monday, November 8, 8:00 PM
Pruyne Lecture Hall (Fayerweather 115), Amherst College
"Few writers can manipulate a plot with Bohjalian's grace and
power," wrote The New York Times Book Review-- a talent
that might explain the novelist's phenomenal success: Midwives was
a number-one New York Times best-seller and a selection of
Oprah's Book Club, and his writing--nine novels, including the brand-new Before
You Know Kindness --has been translated into 17 languages and twice
become acclaimed movies. Bohjalian has written for a variety of magazines,
including Cosmopolitan and the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine ,
and he's something of a local hero as well: he graduated from Amherst
College, and his novel Water Witches is the first One Book/One
Town selection for Northampton. He lives in Vermont with his wife and
daughter.
Click here to visit Chris Bohjalian's website.
Judith Frank
Monday, November 15, 8:00 PM
Book Party (dessert!) and Reading
The Alumni House, Amherst College
Claire Messud
glows over Judith Frank's first novel: "Fearless
and unflinching, Crybaby Butch rigorously explores
butch/femme dynamics over two generations. Judy Frank's debut novel
is searing and memorable." Memorable, too, was the chapter that
Frank previewed in The Massachusetts Review: it won her the 2000 fiction
prize from the Astraea Foundation's Emerging Lesbian Writer's Fund,
and eager fans have been awaiting the novel ever since. In addition
to another book, Common Ground: Eighteenth Century English Satiric
Fiction and the Poor , Frank has published stories and essays
in numerous journals and anthologies. She received a Ph.D. in English
literature and an MFA in fiction from Cornell University, and is Associate
Professor of English at Amherst College.
Please click here to buy Crybaby Butch.
Please click here for an excerpt from Crybaby
Butch.
Spring
2004 Events
The Amherst College English Department and the Center for Creative
Writing are delighted to invite you to a series of fiction readings.
All events are free and open to the public, and will be followed by
refreshments. For more information, please call 542-8200.
Community Reading at
Dickinson Museum
March 31-April 3
In a series
entitled "Can I expound upon the
skies?" organizations, classes and other groups will
engage in a community reading of all 1789 Emily Dickinson
poems at The Dickinson Museum. The event will take place
on Wednesday, March 31 from 12 noon until 6 p.m.; Thursday,
April 1 from 10 a.m. until 6 p.m.; Friday, April 2 from 10
a.m. until 6 p.m.; and Saturday, April 3, from 10 a.m. until
5 p.m.
The reading is sponsored by The Emily Dickinson Museum. Participating
organizations include the Amherst Club, the Amherst Woman's Club, Amherst
Writers and Artists, the Mead Art Museum, the National Yiddish Book
Center, and departments from Amherst College, Hampshire College, Mount
Holyoke College, Smith College and the University of Massachusetts.
The reading is part of a series of events that will take place during
the week of March 28-April 3, in a program entitled " 'a little
Madness in the Spring': Celebrating History and Poetry at The Emily
Dickinson Museum." For more information about this and the rest
of the week's events, visit www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org.
Lisa Beskin
Monday, April 12th, 8:00 pm
Fayerweather 115, Amherst College
Beskin's book of poems, My Work Among the Faithful, was the
winner of the 2003 Blue Lynx Award and will be published in May by
the Lynx House Press. Beskin has received awards from the Academy of
American Poets and the Associated Writing Programs, and her poems of
have appeared widely, in such publications as the Denver Quarterly,
McSweeney's, jubilat, the Boston Review, Fence. She was
a featured poet on the Poetry Daily website, and is included in their
recently-published anthology, Poetry Daily: 366 Poems from the
World's Most Popular Poetry Website .
She has taught poetry at Yale University, Mount Holyoke College, and
Amherst College.
For an excerpt from her poetry, please click here.
Remembering James Merrill at Amherst
April 24
As part of its Millionth Volume festivities, the Amherst College Library
will hold a symposium honoring the memory and literary work of one
of Amherst's extraordinary alumni, the poet James I. Merrill. Remembering
James Merrill at Amherst will take place on Saturday afternoon,
April 24, 2004 from 2-4 p.m. in the Pruyne Lecture Hall (Room 115)
in Fayerweather.
Local and national writers and scholars will commemorate Merrill's
life and work. Merrill's nephew, the poet and writer Robin Magowan,
will speak about Merrill's year teaching at Amherst, 1955-56, and his
novel The Seraglio. Poet Laureate Richard Wilbur will
recall his friendship with Merrill and speak of Amherst College in
the 1940s. Jack Hagstrom, Merrill's bibliographer, will speak
about his early publications. Langdon Hammer, Merrill's official
biographer, will provide the context of Merrill's life at Amherst. Writer
and poet Stephen Yenser, Merrill's literary executor and editor, with
a forthcoming collection of Merrill's letters, will consider Merrill's
youthful writing, especial the poetry, prose and letters written while
he was an undergraduate at Amherst, 1943-47. Daniel Hall, the
poet who was the first Fellow to live and write in Merrill's apartment
in Stonington, Connecticut, and who is now director of the Creative
Writing Center at Amherst, will moderate the panel discussion. Members
of the audience, especially those who knew Merrill or know his work,
are encouraged to participate in the discussion.
The symposium, which is free and open to the public, will be followed
by a reception in the Archive and Special Collections in the Robert
Frost Library, where Merrill's books, letters, manuscripts and memorabilia
and the works of symposium participants will be on display.
Past Events:
Katharine
Stall
Wednesday, February 4th. 4:30 pm.
Babbott
Room, Octagon.
Katharine Stall's first novel, Den of Thieves , has
been described as an intensely moral thriller--what author Harvey
Cox has termed as "a kind of theological Catch-22 ." The
New York Times praised the novel for having both "a conscience
and a sense of humor." Stall is at work on a second book, Dr. Zen, in
which she examines the implications of random violence. Stall
has been a Fellow at both the Bread Loaf Conference and the Iowa Writer's
Workshop, as well as a resident at the MacDowell Colony. She currently
works as a writing tutor in the African-American Studies Program at
Wesleyan University.
Lucy
Corin
PLEASE NOTE: THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED
Monday, February 16th. 4:30 pm.
Porter Lounge,
Converse Hall.
In her debut novel, Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls, Lucy
Corin's innovatively layered narrative evokes the culture of girl-killers,
where spectacular violence is the idiom of everyday life, and "everything
innocent is in imminent danger." Patricia Eakins has praised Corin's
refusal to "compromise the complexity of experience and language," concluding
that, "Hers is a fully awakened sensibility." Corin's stories have
been published in a number of literary journals and anthologies, including Ploughshares and The
Iowa Review . She is currently assistant professor of English
at James Madison University.
Okey
Ndibe
Thursday, February 19th. 4:30 pm
Fayerweather 117
John Edgar Wideman has described Okey Ndibe's first novel, Arrows
of Rain, as "first rate fiction," while England's New Internationalist hailed
it as "a superb debut; a gritty political thriller with real emotional
depth." In addition to engaging West Africa's urgent political dilemmas
through his fiction, Ndibe has also worked as a Fulbright Scholar
in Nigeria and an essayist and journalist in Nigeria and the United
States. He is currently a columnist for The Guardian, Nigeria's
largest daily newspaper, and the Visiting Writer-in-Residence and
assistant professor of African American Studies at Simon's Rock College
of Bard.
Danzy
Senna
Wednesday, February 25th. 4:30 pm.
Fayerweather 117
The New York Times described Danzy Senna's Caucasia as
an "absorbing debut novel. . . [which] superbly illustrates the emotional
toll that politics and race take on one especially gutsy young girl's
development. . ." James McBride called the award-winning novel "[l]ucid
and brilliant." Senna has also written widely-anthologized stories
and essays, and her work has appeared in such magazines as Newsweek and The
Nation. The recipient of a Whiting Writer's Award, among other
honors, Senna is currently the Jenks Chair of Contemporary American
Letters at the College of the Holy Cross, where she teaches creative
writing and literature. Her second novel, Symptomatic , will
be published in May.
May-lee
Chai.
Monday, March 1st. 4:30 pm.
Fayerweather 117
In her first novel, My Lucky Face, a story critics called, "beautifully
told," May-lee Chai investigates the impact of China's Cultural
Revolution by following the life of one woman there. Nominated for
a National Book Award in 2001, her second book, The Girl from Purple
Mountain, is a family memoir that Chai co-wrote with her father
to examine the impact of World War II on Chinese civilians. Marilyn
Krysl called it "a work which smolders and sings." Chai's fiction and
essays have been widely published in such places as the San Francisco
Chronicle, ZYZZYVA, and Missouri Review. She currently
teaches political science and literature at the University of Wyoming
in Laramie.
Fall
2003 Events
All events are free and open to the
public, and all will be followed by refreshments.
Sabina
Murray
Monday, September 22, 8:00 pm.
Amherst Books (8 Main Street, Amherst 413/256-1547)
Sabina Murray's most recent book, The Caprices, won the 2003
PEN/Faulkner award for fiction. A collection of short stories based
on the Pacific Campaign, The Caprices "turns the bombed-out
and broken setting of World War II into a theater for humankind, where
both weakness and grace are writ at large," wrote The Washington
Post. "Think of war as the hostile pebble thrown into the peaceful
pond," Murray said in an interview. "I'm writing about the
ripples." Novelist Claire Messud, writing for The New York Times
Book Review, praised the book's "fierce intensity": "Dark
and unflinshing, these brimming, sometimes jagged stories endure powerfully
in the readers' memory as they reach across continents and time with
precision and--in the heart of darkness--a measure of grace."
Raised in Australia and the Philippines, Murray is a former Bunting
Fellow at Harvard University and currently teaches in the MFA program
at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She is the author of
the novel Slow Burn and the screenplay for Beautfiul Country,
a film to be released in 2004.
Click here
to read an excerpt from The Caprices.
Jay
Wright
Monday, September 29, 8:00 pm.
Amherst Books (8 Main Street, Amherst 413/256-1547)
The poet Jay Wright, described by John Hollander as " a brilliant
and original poet" and in the Boston Review as "an unsung
wonder of American poetry," will read from his work. Of Transfigurations,
a book that collects all seven of Wright's previous volumes of poetry,
Peter O'Leary writes, "I haven't felt so ennobled as a reader by
a book of poetry since I started reading the genre. This book is utterly
essential." Wright has defied characterization by experimenting
with voices, languages, cultures, and forms, although, writing for the
New York Times Book Review, Hollander described Wright's poetry
as "powerfully concerned with roots—cultural, intellectual
and spiritual." Wright has, as he put it himself, worked to record
"my developing black African-American life in the United States,
but I also saw that I had the beginning of forms to express lives that
transcended that particular life." Transfigurations might
be understood as an expression of that transcendence.
Wright, who has received a great many awards, including a Guggenheim
Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship, and the 62nd Fellowship of the Academy
of American poets, lives in Vermont.
Click here
to read an excerpt from Transfigurations.
Honor
Moore
Wednesday, October 29, 8:00 pm.
Porter Lounge, Converse
Hall (Amherst College)
Moore has published two collections of poetry, Memoir and Darling,
and a biography, The White Blackbird, of her grandmother, the
painter Margarett Sargent. In her poetry, Moore explores such topics
as longing and death with a radiantly visual precision: a woman’s
hair is the color of raw wood; a dead friend is remembered by how he
placed objects in a room; two lovers “fall together like answers.”
The Boston Review has described Moore’s poetry as “blunt and
brave,” and praised her “unique ability to infuse her poems
with real body heat, emotional electricity, and the divine grief at
the center of desire.”
Moore's poems have appeared in dozens of publications, including The
Paris Review, Ploughshares, Open City, Conjunctions, and American
Poetry Review. Her essays have appeared in such publications as
The New Yorker and The New York Times.
Click here to
read her essay "Close to Home."
Click here
to read an interview with Moore.
Click here to read
excerpts from her writing.
Click here to read
reviews of her work.
Lisa
Chavez
Monday, November 10, 8:00 pm.
Porter Lounge, Converse Hall (Amherst College)
Chávez’s second book of poems, In an Angry Season, is a
poetic retelling of American history in four sections: “Captivity,”
“At the World’s Fairs,” “Surrender,” and “The
New World.” With what Ilan Stavans describes as a "forceful
voice that leaves a . . . mark in the reader’s mind," Chávez,
a Chicana Mestiza, weaves together histories of brutality and oppression,
of creative passion and integrity. In narrative poems richly textured
with her extensive research and political acuity, Chávez speak
the voices of those who have been made captive—whether to racism
or national policy, to bad marriages, alcoholism, or poverty—and
asks, ultimately, what it means to be civilized.
Born in Los Angeles, Chávez was raised in Fairbanks, Alaska and
now lives in Albuquerque where she teaches at the University of New
Mexico. Her first book of poems was Destruction Bay, and her poetry
has also appeared in such publications as The Americas Review, The Colorado
Review, and Prairie Schooner and the anthology American Poetry: The
Next Generation. She is currently at work on a memoir.
Click here
to read poems.
David
Sofield
Monday, November 17, 8:00 pm.
Alumni
House, Amherst College
In his new book, Light Disguise ($14, 63 pp., Copper Beech Press, Providence,
R.I., 2003), David Sofield, the Samuel Williston Professor of English
at Amherst College, offers 30 new poems that “question and re-question
their sense of something seen or perhaps of something heard,” according
to poet Richard Wilbur. Sofield will read from Light Disguise at the
Alumni House at Amherst College on Monday, Nov. 17 at 8 p.m., as part
of the Creative Writing Center’s series of readings.
Light Disguise offers lyrics that explore the dailyness of living, informed
by a intelligence that Mary Jo Salter, poet and professor of English
at Mount Holyoke College, calls “elegant, erudite, [and] deeply
felt.” Daniel Hall, poet and writer-in-residence at Amherst says
Light Disguise is “as lean and satisfying a book as I’ve read
in years.”
Sofield works comfortably in such traditional forms as the villanelle
and sonnet, in couplets and sestets, but also writes long sequences
in strict blank verse. As novelist and poet Brad Leithauser, lecturer
in humanities at Mount Holyoke College, says, “Unlike so much formal
poetry on the scene today, Sofield’s work manifests a craftsmanship
whose end is not mere deference to tradition or the simple urge to flaunt
erudition or expertise; the poems’ formal designs are in service
to subject matter.”
Sofield’s poems have appeared in Poetry, The New Yorker, The Yale
Review, The New Criterion, Southwest Review and The New Republic. He
co-edited Under Criticism (with Herbert F. Tucker, 1998), a collection
of critical essays, to which he contributed “Richard Wilbur’s
‘Lying’.”
Sofield has taught English and creative writing at Amherst since 1965.
He received a B.A. from Princeton University and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees
from Stanford.
Mary
Jo Salter
Monday, December 1, 8:00 pm.
Amherst Books (8 Main Street, Amherst 413/256-1547)
Mary Jo Salter, a wildly popular local poet who “challenges us
with the discovery that something lucid, forthright, and fantastically
disheveled might also be sublime” (New York Times Book Review)
will read from her work.
The author of five books of poetry, Salter’s most recent collection,
Open Shutters (2003), explores the daily flickering of darkness and
light. Donna Seamon describes Salter’s poetry as “so precise
and gravity-defying, so astonishingly eloquent, the exhilarated reader
feels as though she’s watching a gymnast perform intricate, risky,
and unpredictable sequences, nailing each one perfectly.” Poet
Carolyn Kizer wrote of a previous collection, A Kiss in Space (1999),
“These are poems of breathtaking elegance: in formal control, in
intellectual subtlety, in learning lightly displayed”; In the Times
Literary Supplement, Les Murray called this collection “the book
of poetry I loved best this year.”
Salter is Emily Dickinson Senior Lecturer in Humanities at Mount Holyoke
College. Her other books include Henry Purcell in Japan (1985), Unfinished
Painting (the 1989 Lamont Selection for the year's most distinguished
second volume of poetry), Sunday Skaters (nominated in 1994 for the
National Book Critics Circle Award), and a children's book, The Moon
Comes Home (1989). Salter is a coeditor of The Norton Anthology of Poetry
and has received many awards, including a year in France on an Amy Lowell
Poetry Travelling Scholarship. She is on the board of the Amy Clampitt
Trust, the Bogliasco Foundation, and The Kenyon Review, and has been
vice president of the Poetry Society of America since 1995.
Spring
2003 Events
The Amherst College English Department and the Center for Creative Writing
are delighted to invite you to a series of readings. All events are
free and open to the public, and all will be followed by refreshments.
For more information, please call 542-8200.
All readings will take place in the Babbott Room of the Octagon
at 5:00 p.m.
Thursday, February 6th. Poet Daniel Hall.
Hall, whom James Merrill called “a patient craftsman, a weigher
of each word" and whom Booklist has described as "a virtuoso
craftsman" is the author of two collections, Hermit with Landscape
and Strange Relation. His poems, memoirs, and book reviews have been
published in the National Poetry Series, the Yale Review, Verse, and
Parnassus. Hall has received numerous awards and fellowships--from the
Ingram Merrill Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and
the Whiting Foundation, among others. His most recent distinction is
being named a 2003 Guggenheim Fellow. Hall has taught poetry at Amherst
College since 2000.
***Rescheduled for Tuesday, February 18th, at 5 pm
in the Bruss Room of Johnson Chapel***Author David Anthony Durham.
After the publication of Gabriel’s Story, his historical novel
about race and the post-Civil War American West, Publishers Weekly called
Durham a “born storyteller.” The winner of the Zora Neale
Hurston/Richard Wright prize for a short story “Boy-Fish,”
Durham has also written another acclaimed novel, Walk Through Darkness,
about a runaway slave. He currently lives with his family in rural Scotland,
where he is at work on a third novel.
Thursday, February 20th. Poet Martín Espada.
Yusef Komunyakaa described Espada’s most recent collection, A Mayan
Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen, as “recalibrat[ing] history
till a scary clarity stares us in the eye.” Espada has published
his poetry in a number of collections, anthologies, and publications,
including the Massachusetts Review, The Nation, and Diario Latino, and
his numerous honors include fellowships from the National Endowment
for the Arts and the PEN/Revson Foundation. Espada is also an essayist,
a translator, an editor, and a Professor of English at the University
of Massachusetts-Amherst.
**THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELED**
Thursday, February 27th. Author Sabina Murray.
In a review of Caprices, Murray’s recent collection of short stories,
The New York Times said that “. . . what she delivers can achieve
a prophetic resonance”; Claire Messud called the stories “dark
and unflinching.” Murray has also published essays, poetry, and
a novel, Slow Burn, and her screenplay, Beautiful Country, is currently
in production. Her soon-to-be-finished novel, A Carnivore’s Inquiry,
looks at exploration, art, and cannibalism. Murray was been the recipient
of a Bunting Fellowship, among other awards, and she currently teaches
at the Phillips Academy, Andover.
Monday, March 3rd. Poet Gray Jacobik.
Jacobik has received the Yeats Prize, a Fellowship from the National
Endowment for the Arts, and numerous other awards for her volumes of
poetry. Her most recent book, Brave Disguises, was awarded the 2001
AWP Poetry Series Award; Judging poet Marilyn Chin praised the book’s
“delightful lush content,” and Robert Cording remarked that
“at the center of these poems is a writer who is willing to open
herself fully to the world’s and living’s beautiful strangeness
and capricious painfulness.” Jacobik is a Professor of English
and Poet-in-Residence at Eastern Connecticut State University.
Thursday, March 6th. Novelist Brian Kiteley.
On NPR’s “Morning Edition,” Rod MacLeish praised Kiteley’s
first novel, Still Life With Insects, for its true novelty, and said
that “with a skill that any writer worth his salt will envy, Brian
Kiteley manages to bring his people to brilliant, eccentric life.”
Kiteley has also written a second novel, I Know Many Songs, But I Cannot
Sing, as well as a book of fiction exercises, Each Sentence Educates
the Next. He is currently completing The River Gods, a historical novel
about Northampton, Massachusetts. A recipient of fellowships from the
Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, among
other awards, Kiteley is Associate Professor of English at the University
of Denver.
Rikki Ducornet. Monday, April 14th, 5 pm, Babbott Room, Octagon.
Poet and novelist Rikki Ducornet will read from her forthcoming
novel, Gazelle. The event, sponsored by the Amherst College English
Department, the Creative Writing Center and the F. Scott Turow Fund,
is free and open to the public and will be followed by refreshments.
Ducornet’s bold, generous writing alludes to such various influences
as the Kabala, Kafka, the wonder cabinets of Peter the Great, Lewis
Carroll, and Angela Carter; of each new book, her fans might expect
nothing except a liberated imagination. The London Times, for example,
called Ducornet’s 1995 novel, Phosphor in Dreamland, “both
incoherent and astonishing, a complex fantasia redolent of Swift and
Borges, but stranger than both.” And Robert Chatain observed, in
The Chicago Tribune, that “It’s startling and refreshing to
encounter a writer whose work insists so relentlessly upon the magic
of making tales.” Ducornet’s other novels include The Stain,
Entering Fire, The Fountains of Neptune, and The Jade Cabinet.
Sue Miller. Monday, April 28th, 2003, 8 pm, Fayerweather
115.
The wildly popular author Sue Miller, whose novels include
While I Was Gone, a national best-seller and Oprah Book Club selection,
and, most recently, The World Below, described as "Gorgeous"
by Publishers Weekly, will read from her work. The event, sponsored
by the Amherst College Creative Writing Center and the F. Scott Turow
Fund, is free and open to the public and will be followed by refreshments.
The World Below, Miller's fifth novel since her 1986 smash-success
debut, The Good Mother, has been beloved of readers and critics alike.
As Publisher's Weekly puts it, "Miller limns contemporary life
in deft, sure strokes, with an unerring ear for the way parents and
children talk; no one can parse a modern marriage as well as she can."
And in a rave New York Times review, William Pritchard insists that
"Miller has never written better about love and lust." Miller’s
most recent book is The Story of My Father: A Memoir, an account of
a parent’s affliction with Alzheimer’s, published in March
of this year by Knopf. Miller lives and writes in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
and currently teaches fiction at Amherst College.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Matthew Zapruder. Wednesday, November 20. 8pm. Russian Center, Webster,
2nd floor. Refreshments to follow.
Brigit Pegeen Kelly. Monday, December 2.
8 pm. 
Phillis Levin. Thursday, November 7. 8 pm. 
Robert
Stone. Tuesday, October 22. 8 pm. 
Pauline
Melville. Wednesday, October 16. 8 pm. Porter Lounge, 
April Bernard. Wednesday, October 2. 8 pm. Porter Lounge, 
The double Booker Prize-winning author Peter Carey,
whose novels include Oscar and Lucinda, Jack Maggs,
and True History of the Kelly Gang, will read from his work.Claire Messud calls Carey "one of the most thrilling
and versatile novelists at work in English today, a writer who genuinely
makes the world new. Each of his novels is a daring surprise, but
all of them glitter with dark humor and rare seriousness, without
ever sacrificing the storyteller's delights."" [The True History of the Kelly Gang] contains
pretty much everything you could ask of a novel." The New
York Times Book Review
Daniel Hall, a poet and visiting writer at Amherst College,
says, “Thom Gunn has reinvented himself and his art at every
stage of his long career. He is an endlessly fascinating poet whose
subjects range from the varieties of ecstatic experience to the darkly
existential; in his ability to write formal verse as well as free
he has few rivals.” The Guardian (London) wrote that “Gunn’s
generous poetry, passionate and tactful in equal measure, moves between
elegy and celebration with enviable fluency and breadth of technique.”
The poet Charles O. Hartman, whose collections include
Glass Enclosure and The Long View, will read from his
work. "If poets are lucky to study everything," writes the
Boston Book Review, "Hartman's wide-ranging and inventive mind
is one of the luckiest writing. His poems are our good fortune."
Hartman's diverse and dazzlingly intelligent poems have been published
in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, and Yale Review.
Hartman is Professor of English and Poet in Residence at Connecticut
College. He is also a jazz guitarist and co-director of the 
John D'Agata, described by Annie Dillard as "a
young writer of rare intelligence and artistry," will give a
reading from Halls of Fame, his collection of lyric essays.A 