The Creative Writing Program is pleased to announce the Fall
2007 reading series. We hope you'll attend these festive educational events.
In addition to readings, many of the visiting poets and writers will be
meeting with students and faculty. All events are free and open to the public.
For more
information about the series or about on-campus parking, contact Laurel Guy lrg29@cornell.edu.
Go to the new
Writers at Cornell blog to listen to J.Robert LennonÕs interviews with our
visiting writers: http://writersatcornell.blogspot.com/
August
30, Thursday: Willie Perdomo, Poet
4:30 pm, Hollis
E. Cornell Auditorium, Goldwin Smith
This
event is made possible by the generosity of two anonymous donors.
Smoking Lovely Named WINNER of the 2004 Beyond Margins Award
from PEN American Center.
Willie Perdomo is the author of Where
a Nickel Costs a Dime
and Smoking Lovely,
which received a PEN America Beyond Margins Award. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine and
Bomb. He is the author of Visiting
Langston,
a Coretta Scott King Honor Book for Children, and has been featured on several
PBS documentaries including Words in Your Face and The United States of Poetry
as well as HBOÕs Def Poetry Jam and BETÕs Hughesâ Dream Harlem. He has recently received a Woolrich
Fellowship in Creative Writing at Columbia University and is a 2006 grant
recipient from the Urban Artist Initiative/New York City. He is co-publisher of Cypher Books.
September
13, Thursday: Sandra Cisneros, Fiction Writer
7:30 pm,
Schwartz Auditorium, Rockefeller
This
event is made possible by the generosity of two anonymous donors.
Sandra Cisneros is a novelist, poet, short
story writer and essayist whose work gives voice to working-class Latino and
Latina life in America. Her lyrical, realistic work blends aspects of ÒhighÓ
and popular culture. Her novel The House on Mango Street, a series of vignettes told
from the perspective a young girl growing up in Chicago is required reading in
schools across the country. It has sold over two million copies. Women
Hollering Creek and Other Stories, a collection of short stories, won the PEN Center
West Award for Best Fiction of 1991, as well as other awards. Cisneros is the
author of 3 volumes of poetry: Bad Boys, My Wicked Wicked Ways, Loose Woman.
Her other
works include Hairs/Pelitos, a childrenÕs book; Caramelo, a novel; and Vintage
Cisneros, a
compilation of her works.
In
1995, Cisneros was awarded the prestigious MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. She
has been awarded many literary honors, most recently the Texas Medal of Art in
2003.
September
27, Thursday: Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Poet
4:30 pm, Hollis
E. Cornell Auditorium, Goldwin Smith
This
event is made possible by the generosity of two anonymous donors.
Winner of a
Rona Jaffe Award for Emerging Women Writers and the Paris Review's Bernard F.
Connors Prize, Gabrielle Calvocoressi currently holds a prestigious Jones
Lectureship in Creative Writing at Stanford University, where she was a Wallace
Stegner Fellow. Her poems have appeared in distinguished journals including The
New England Review and The Paris Review. She lives in Berkeley, California. Her
debut collection of poems is entitled The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart. From the title
poem, which swells with a tide, onward, characters react to aviator Amelia
Earhart's disappearance and to the raw, addictive, and corrupting draw of an
adult drive-in as Calvocoressi fearlessly wanders into imaginative, as well as
realistic, space, speaking truth, assessing damage, and giving expression to
those who are left behind.
October
18, Thursday: Salman Rushdie, Fiction Writer and Essayist
8:00 pm, Uris
Auditorium
*Live Closed Circuit Broadcast Room - Plant Science 233
Thursday, October 18, 8:00 pm
These seats are located in a separate room (Plant Science 233) It
is a GREAT Room, and the entire event will be broadcast LIVE in high
quality on a large
screen. Free admittance, first come, first served.
This
event is made possible by the generosity of two anonymous donors.
Sir Salman
Rushdie is one of the most successful, controversial and celebrated
authors of our time. Rushdie is the author of such international bestsellers as
Midnight's Children and The Satanic Verses. The latter
was deemed sacrilegious by Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini, who issued a fatwa
against Rushdie in 1989. Despite this proclamation, and the international
controversy that followed, Rushdie went on to produce some of his most
compelling work, including The Moor's Last Sigh, and The
Ground Beneath Her Feet while living under the constant threat of death.
His most recent novel, Shalimar the Clown, was an international
bestseller and a nominee for both the Man Booker Prize and the Commonwealth
Writer's Prize.
Rushdie is also a prolific essayist. Step Across This Line:
Collected Non-Fiction, 1992-2002, contains many of Rushdie's most
provocative articles, some of which explore his own reaction to the fatwa, as well
as reactions of the media and various governments.
Rushdie is the winner of numerous literary prizes and awards,
including the prestigious Man Booker Prize, and the "Booker of
Bookers" Award, which was awarded to the best Booker-winning novel of the
prize's first 25 years. In 2007 Rushdie was officially knighted by the Queen,
for services to literature.
November
1, Thursday: William Kennedy, Fiction Writer
7:30 pm, Hollis
E. Cornell Auditorium, Goldwin Smith
The James McConkey Reading in American Fiction.
This event is made possible by the generosity of Fred Parkin,
Class of 1963.
For some 40
years, William Kennedy has crafted history and memory into a body of
literature that is as remarkable for its variety as it is for erecting an
Albany of the imagination. In Kennedy's highly regarded "Albany
Cycle," outcasts and machine politicians, lowlifes and swells populate an
imagined Albany as real as any city of bricks. Thanks to Kennedy, Albany
occupies a privileged place on America's mythic map as a capital of the
national memory, and a metropolis of everyday struggles.
Kennedy's works include The Ink Truck, Legs, Billy
Phelan's Greatest Game, Ironweed, a winner of 1984 Pulitzer
Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, and Roscoe.
Kennedy's literary successes opened the door to the world of
movie-making. A long-time cinema enthusiast and movie reviewer, he began to
write screenplays when he co-scripted The Cotton Club with Francis
Ford Coppola. He also wrote the film version of Ironweed, directed by
Hector Babenco and starring Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep.
Kennedy has received numerous literary awards including a National
Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur
Foundation Fellowship.
November 15,
Thursday: Lee Smith, Fiction Writer
and
Hal Crowther, Nonfiction Writer and Poet
7:30 pm, Hollis
E. Cornell Auditorium, Goldwin Smith
This
event is made possible by the generosity of two anonymous donors.
Hal
CrowtherÕs current collection of
essays, Gather at the River, was 2006 finalist for the National
Book Critics Circle Prize for criticism.
For his first collection, Unarmed but Dangerous, he was cited by
Kirkpatrick Sale as Òthe best essayist working in journalism today.Ó Cathedrals
of Kudzu has been one of the New SouthÕs most honored and critically
acclaimed works of nonfiction.
Crowther, a former columnist and film and drama critic for the Buffalo
News, staff writer for Time and media critic for Newsweek, has filed his
personal essays on culture, media, politics, natural history and unnatural
humanity from every continent except Australia and Antarctica.
Lee Smith is the author of eleven novels, including Oral
History, Saving Grace, The DevilÕs Dream, and Fair
and Tender Ladies, as well as three collections of stories. Her novel The Last
Girls was a 2002 New York Times bestseller as well as co-winner of the
Southern Book Critics Circle Award. A retired professor of English at North
Carolina State University, she received an Academy Award in Fiction from the
American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1999. Her new novel, On Agate Hill was published
October 2006.