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Visiting Writers Series 2011–2012 |
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Please see below for information on our current schedule, as well as a list of past participants.
Levis Reading Prize Winner Nick Lantz is the author of two recent collections of poetry. The first, We Don’t Know We Don’t Know (Graywolf Press, 2010), won the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Bakeless Prize, the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, and the Council for Wisconsin Writers Posner Book-Length Poetry Award. The second collection, The Lightning That Strikes the Neighbors’ House (University of Wisconsin Press, 2010), was selected by former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky for the Felix Pollak Prize. Lantz has received fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and his work has appeared in Mid-American Review, Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Poetry Daily, and FIELD, and has been featured on the nationally syndicated radio program The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor. He has taught creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, at the Tinker Mountain Writers’ Workshop, in the Queens University Low-Residency MFA, and at Gettysburg College, where he was the 2010-11 Emerging Writer Lecturer. Starting in the fall he’ll be teaching at Franklin & Marshall College.
Tayari Jones Tayari Jones is the author of three novels: Leaving Atlanta (Warner Books, 2002), which won the 2003 Hurston–Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction; The Untelling (Warner Books, 2005), which won the 2005 Lillian C. Smith Award for New Voices and was a finalist for the 2006 Hurston–Wright Legacy Award for Fiction; and Silver Sparrow (Algonquin Books, 2011). Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Callaloo, McSweeney’s, and The Believer, and it has been anthologized in New Stories From the South, 2004. Jones has received numerous fellowships, including the 2009 Collins Fellowship from the United States Artists Foundation, the 2004 Walter E. Dankin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers Conference, and the 2003 Fletcher Pratt Fellowship from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. Currently, she serves as assistant professor in the MFA program at Rutgers–Newark University. She is spending the 2011–12 academic year at Harvard University as a Radcliffe Institute Fellow, researching her fourth novel.
VCU Cabell David Gordon won the 2011 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, which honors an outstanding debut novel published during a calendar year. His winning book is The Serialist, a darkly humorous noir parody that chronicles the adventures of a pulp writer embroiled in an unsavory real-life plot. Gordon was born in Queens and lives in New York City, with stops in New Jersey, London and Los Angeles along the way. He attended Sarah Lawrence College, holds an MA in English and Comparative Literature and an MFA in Fiction Writing, both from Columbia University, and has worked in film, fashion, publishing and pornography. The Serialist is his first novel. Gordon’s reading and a panel discussion with his agent and editor will cap off this year’s two-day VCU Cabell First Novelist Festival, a special event celebrating the Award’s ten-year anniversary and including past winners and NPR reviewer Alan Cheuse. For more information on the Festival please visit the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award web site at:
Elizabeth Hand Elizabeth Hand is a multiple-award-winning author of numerous books for adults, young adults, and children, whose genre-spanning work includes fantasy, science fiction, suspense, and historical and mainstream fiction. She is also a longtime critic whose book reviews and essays have appeared in The Washington Post, Salon, the Village Voice, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and DownEast Magazine, among others. She is on the faculty at the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing and has taught at writing workshops around the country. Two of her novels will appear early in 2012: Available Dark, a sequel to her Shirley Jackson Award-winning thriller, Generation Loss; and Radiant Days, a YA novel about French poet Arthur Rimbaud. She lives on the coast of Maine, where she is currently at work on Wylding Hall, a contemporary reboot of Daphne Du Maurier's classic Rebecca, and Flash Burn, third in her series of punk noir novels featuring Cass Neary.
Linda Gregerson Linda Gregerson is the author of four poetry collections: Magnetic North, Waterborne, The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep, and Fire in the Conservatory. She has received awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Poetry Society of America, and the Modern Poetry Association as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Mellon, and Bogliasco Foundations, the Institute for Advanced Study, the National Humanities Center, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Magnetic North was a finalist for the National Book Award, and Waterborne won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep was a finalist for both The Poet's Prize and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Granta, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, Poetry Review (UK), and many other publications. She is the Caroline Walker Bynum Distinguished University Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan, where she teaches creative writing and Renaissance literature.
Darin Strauss is the international bestselling author of the New York Times Notable books Chang and Eng and The Real McCoy, and of the national bestseller More Than It Hurts You. He was a Guggenheim Fellow and won the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award for Half a Life. His work has been translated into fourteen languages and published in seventeen countries. Born in the Long Island town of Roslyn Harbor, Strauss attended Tufts University, where he studied with Jay Cantor. He is married to the journalist Susannah Meadows and is the father of identical twin boys. He currently resides in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches writing at New York University.
Rebecca Mitchell Tarumoto Short Fiction Prize March 28, 2012 – 8pm Ron Carlson's most recent book is the novel The Signal from Viking. His short stories have appeared in Esquire, Harpers, The New Yorker, and other journals, as well as The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize series, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction and other anthologies. Ron Carlson Writes a Story, his book on writing, is taught widely. He has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Cohen Prize at Ploughshares, the McGinnis Award at the Iowa Review, the Aspen Literary Award. His novel Five Skies was One Book Rhode Island in 2009. He is Director of the Graduate Program in Fiction at the University of California, Irvine.
Dana Levin Dana Levin's first book, In the Surgical Theatre, was published by American Poetry Review (Copper Canyon) and went on to receive nearly every award available to first books and emerging poets. Copper Canyon brought out her second book, Wedding Day, in 2005 and her third, Sky Burial, in 2011. The Los Angeles Times says of her work, "Dana Levin's poems are extravagant...her mind keeps making unexpected connections and the poems push beyond convention...they surprise us." Her work has appeared in many anthologies, including Legitimate Dangers, The Poet’s Child, This Art, American Poetry: The Next Generation, and in magazines such as The Kenyon Review, Poetry, The Paris Review and The American Poetry Review. She currently teaches Creative Writing at the Santa Fe University of Art and Design.
Matthew Zapruder is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Come On All You Ghosts (Copper Canyon, 2010), which was the Goodreads Readers' Choice selection for poetry, and was also selected as one of the year's top five poetry books by Publishers Weekly, as well as the 2010 Booklist Editors' Choice for poetry, and the 2010 Northern California Independent Booksellers Association poetry book of the year. His poems, essays and translations have appeared in many publications, including Bomb, Slate, Poetry, Tin House, The Paris Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker, McSweeney's, The Believer, Real Simple, and The Los Angeles Times. He has received a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship, a William Carlos Williams Award, a May Sarton Award from the Academy of American Arts and Sciences, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship. Currently he works as an editor for Wave Books and teaches as a member of the core faculty of UCR-Palm Desert's Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing. Previous VCU Visiting Writers Richard Bausch • Bruce Beasley • Aimee Bender • Charles Bernstein • John Bresland • Linda Bierds • Robert Olen Butler • Ron Carlson • John Casey • Victoria Chang • Kelly Cherry • Joan Connor • Rebecca Curtis • Dennis Danvers • Samuel R. Delany • Mark Doty • Stuart Dybek • Mary Gaitskill • Beckian Fritz Goldberg • Ron Hansen • Terrance Hayes • Fanny Howe • Richard Jackson • Allison Joseph • Alison Kennedy • Yusef Komunyaaka • Philip Levine • Kelly Link • Bret Lott • Thomas Lux • Elizabeth McCracken • Thomas Mallon • Sheri Reynolds • David Rivard • Mary Ruefle • George Saunders • Alan Shapiro • Gerald Stern • Ellen Bryant Voigt • Colson Whitehead • CK Williams • Charles Wright • Dean Young All events are free and open to the public. The series is sponsored by the Department of English of the VCU College of Humanities and Sciences and the Graduate Writers' Association, with additional funding made possible through the generosity of James Branch Cabell Library Associates, Friends of the Library, the VCU Libraries, the VCU Honors College, Barnes & Noble @ VCU Bookstore, and the family of Larry Levis. In addition, New Virginia Review, Inc. sponsors a readings series titled Poetic Principles, which brings to Richmond and makes available to our students some of the best poets and writers at work today. Finally, the Graduate Writers Association sponsors The Moveable Feast, a series of readings given by MFA students. Each spring, the series, held at the Visual Arts Center of Richmond, features thesis readings by students in their final year in the program. |
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last updated
February 2, 2012
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