October 9, 2006
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417
AMHERST, Mass.—Amherst College faculty members Alexander Chee and Judith Frank will read from works in progress at 8 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 26, in Pruyne Lecture Hall (Fayerweather 115) on the Amherst campus. This event is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.
Alexander Chee and Judith Frank, both recipients of the Lambda Literary Award that celebrates the publication of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) literature, will be reading excerpts from their ongoing second novels.
Chee is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Edinburgh and a visiting writer at Amherst College. In Queen of the Night, his current novel set in the 19th century, an opera singer pledges to forgo speaking in order to communicate only through song, but finds herself trapped within the destinies of the characters she portrays. Publisher’s Weekly describes Chee as “a gifted, poetic writer who takes big risks” and “a major talent whose career will bear watching.” He attended Wesleyan University and the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.
Frank is a professor of English at Amherst College. Her first novel, Crybaby Butch, received the Astraea Foundation’s Emerging Lesbian Writers’ Fund fiction grant. Frank will read from Noah’s Ark, her developing novel that follows the trials of a gay couple in the U.S. who take in two Jewish children orphaned by a café bombing in Jerusalem. Frank received her B.A. degree from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and holds a Ph.D. and M.F.A. from Cornell.
The Amherst College Creative Writing Center puts on a yearly reading series featuring both emerging and established authors. For more information, please see the center’s website.
###