Cornell's creative writing program is pleased to announce its Spring 2007 Reading Series. Authors at various stages of their careers are invited to read from their works and discuss the craft and culture of writing. All events are free and open to the public.

Go to the new Writers at Cornell blog to listen to J.Robert Lennon’s interviews with our visiting writers: http://writersatcornell.blogspot.com/

February 8, Thursday: Elizabeth Alexander, Poet

7:30 pm, Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, Goldwin Smith

Praise for American Sublime:

American Sublime Named One of 25 Notable Books of 2005 by the American Library Association

A brilliant new collection by Elizabeth Alexander, whose "poems bristle with the irresistible quality of a world seen fresh." – Rita Dove, The Washington Post

In her fourth remarkable collection, American Sublime (October 2005), Elizabeth Alexander voices the outcries, dreams, and histories of an African American tradition that goes back to the rebellion on the slave schooner Amistad and to the artists’ canvases of nineteenth-century America. In persona poems, historical narratives, jazz riffs, sonnets, elegies, and a sequence of ars poetica, American Sublime is Alexander’s most vivid and varied collection and affirms her place as one of America’s most lively and gifted writers. American Sublime was selected as a “2005 Notable Book” by the American Library Association and was a Pulitzer Prize Finalist.

Elizabeth Alexander was born in New York City and grew up in Washington, DC. She has read her poetry and lectured across the country and abroad. Her previous collections of poetry include Antebellum Dream Book, The Venus Hottentot and Body of Life, and a collection of essays, The Black Interior. Alexander has recently received an Alphonse Fletcher, Sr. Fellowship for work that contributes to improving race relations in American society and has been named a finalist for the 2005 Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Award. She is a faculty member at Cave Canem Workshop and teaches at Yale University.

February 15, Thursday: Willie Perdomo, Poet

4:30 pm, Goldwin Smith 258

Smoking Lovely Named WINNER of the 2004 Beyond Margins Award from PEN American Center.

“Poet Willie Perdomo’s latest book, Smoking Lovely, makes Latin Manhattan’s neighborhoods sparkle like a Fourth of July night sky. With muscular slanguage that’s funny and surreal, Perdomo explores love and struggle. He makes readers stop uptown and visit the forgotten --like the character Kriptonite, a thug to some, but in Perdomo’s poem, a man who has been in love and in trouble.” – David Mills, NY POST

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 HBO’s Def Poetry Jam and BET’s Hughes‚ 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.

February 22, Thursday: Junot Diaz, Fiction Writer

7:30 pm, Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, Goldwin Smith

“The world in Junot Diaz's short story collection Drown is gritty, sad, and hilarious, and the pictures he paints of life in the Dominican Republic, and of Dominican immigrants in America, is rich with pathos. When Drown came out in 1996, Diaz was hailed as one of the "new voices" – and already, the highest praise for a young writer is to be called the "next Junot Diaz." – Powells.com

Junot Díaz, MFA ’95, is the author of Drown. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, African Voices, Best American Short Stories (1996, 1997, 1999, 2000), and in Pushcart Prize XXII. He has received a Eugene McDermott Award, a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, a Lila Acheson Wallace Readers Digest Award, the 2002 Pen/Malamud Award, the 2003 US-Japan Creative Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. He is an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

March 1, Thursday: Yvette Christiansë, Poet and Fiction Writer

4:30 pm, Goldwin Smith 258

Co-sponsored by Feminist, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Program and Africana Studies & Research Center

Praise for Unconfessed:

“A gorgeous, devastating song of freedom that will inevitably be compared to Toni Morrison's Beloved.” – Kirkus Reviews

“Breathtaking...A haunting meditation on love, loss, and the stories we choose to tell in order to survive.” – Caroline Leavitt, People Magazine

Several years ago, Yvette Christiansë returned to her native country of South Africa in search of slave narratives of the kind she had found so readily in the United States. When she discovered that there were none, she began researching 19th century court records, and it was among the old court transcripts that she discovered Sila van den Kaap—a slave woman on trial for murdering her child. Born from those records is Christiansë’s first novel: Unconfessed.

Yvette Christiansë, an associate professor at Fordham University and a scholar in African American literature and postcolonial studies, was raised in South Africa under apartheid and emigrated to Australia via Switzerland when she was eighteen. Through her academic articles on the present-day repercussions of apartheid, she remains an active observer and commentator upon South Africa's Truth and reconciliation project

March 8, Thursday: George Saunders, Fiction Writer

7:30 pm, Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, Goldwin Smith

“So imaginative, so wickedly diverting that the undertow takes you before you even feel a chill...Saunders has been likened to other great American social satirists—Nathanael West, Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon—and it’s a valid comparison in terms of effect. But he is definitely a voice of his own time, keeping up with the heaving cultural tide.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune

“George Saunders is a goddamned genius…If you haven’t yet been exposed to Saunders’ singular point of view and knockout storytelling ability, In Persuasion Nation is a fantastic place to start.” —Giant

George Saunders is the author of the short story collections Pastoralia, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (both New York Times Notable Books) and, most recently, In Persuasion Nation.  CivilWarLand in Bad Decline was a Finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. He is also the author of the novella-length illustrated fable, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, the New York Times bestselling children's book, The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip, illustrated by Lane Smith, (which has won major children’s literature prizes in Italy and the Netherlands), and a forthcoming book of selected non-fiction, Esther Forbes vs. the Braindead Megaphone.

His work has been translated into many languages, and has appeared in the O’Henry, Best American Short Story, Best Non-Required Reading, and Best American Travel Writing anthologies. In 2001, Saunders was selected by Entertainment Weekly as one of the 100 top most creative people in entertainment, and by The New Yorker in 2002 and one of the best writers 40 and under. In 2006, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and named a MacArthur Fellow. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Syracuse University. 

March 15, Thursday: David Barber, Poet

4:30 pm, Goldwin Smith 258

"The botanist, the beekeeper, the falconer, the grammarian, the master of the high wire, the student of dew: David Barber's Wonder Cabinet finds room for them all. And finds in them all the common ground of poetry: devout articulation of the given world. Barber's gift for form is most luminous at just that juncture where form becomes meaning. These poems are built on wonder, and beautifully produce it.” – Linda Gregerson

David Barber is the poetry editor at the Atlantic Monthly and teaches in the graduate writing program at Emerson College and at MIT. His first collection of poems, The Spirit Level, received the Terrence Des Pres Prize and was published by TriQuarterly Books / Northwestern University Press. A second collection, Wonder Cabinet, was published by Northwestern this year. He was recently selected for a 2007 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. He has also received a Massachusetts state arts fellowship, a PEN/New England Discovery Award, the Ross Feld Award for Criticism from Parnassus: Poetry in Review, and two AWP awards while completing the MA in English and Writing at Stanford University. He has been a writer in residence at Northwestern University and Lynchburg College, and a editorial panelist at the Breadloaf and Sewanee writing conferences. His poems have appeared in Agni, Atlantic Monthly, Field, Georgia Review, Gettysburg Review, The New Republic, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Slate, Southwest Review, TriQuarterly Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. He has written essays and reviews for a variety of publications including Poetry, Parnassus, Boston Review, Boston Globe, Washington Post, and The New York Times Book Review.

March 29, Thursday: Sandra Gilbert, Poet and Critic

7:30 pm, Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, Goldwin Smith

M.H. Abrams Distinguished Visiting Professor

“Sandra Gilbert’s poems are beautifully situated at the intersection of craft and feeling. Belongings is a stellar collection by a virtuoso with heart.” —Billy Collins

Sandra M. Gilbert is one of the most esteemed American feminist critics now living. Gilbert is a professor of English at the University of California, Davis, is the author of seven collections of poetry: In the Fourth World (Alabama), The Summer Kitchen (the Heyeck Press), Emily’s Bread, Blood Pressure, Ghost Volcano and Kissing the Bread: New and Selected Poems 1969-1999 (the last four all from W. W. Norton), as well as, more recently, The Italian Collection (Depot Books). Belongings, her latest book of poems, appeared from Norton in 2005, and a prose work, Death’s Door: Modern Dying and The Ways We Grieve, was published by Norton in 2006.

With Susan Gubar, a professor of English at Indiana University, Gilbert has coauthored The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the 19th-century Literary Imagination, and No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the 20th Century, volumes 1, 2, and 3: The War of the Words, Sexchanges, and Letters from the Front (all from Yale University Press.)

April 5, Thursday: Emily Rosko, Poet

4:30 pm, Goldwin Smith 258

“Emily Rosko has created a palpable world of poems full of the bereft, the lonely, and the baffled. They hold broken objects, the walls of their houses are cracked, the landscape around them withers, yet they endure with wise-crack grit and compassion. Rosko’s writing is eloquent, beautifully cadenced, and perched keenly on the boundary between the sayable known and the felt unknown.”—Deborah Tall

Emily Rosko, MFA ’03, is the author of Raw Goods Inventory (U. Iowa Press, 2006). Recipient of the Stegner, the Ruth Lilly, and the Javits fellowships, Emily is a Ph.D. candidate in Literature & Creative Writing at the University of Missouri-Columbia. A second collection tentatively titled, Weather Inventions, is in the works.

April 12, Thursday: Alice Friman, Poet

4:30 pm, Goldwin Smith 258

“Alice Friman's sensuous poems edify, surprise, and amuse. She is a poet who can capture the pain of loss and chart and route recovery with equal skill. Read.” –Diana Der-Hovanessian

Alice Friman's new book is The Book of the Rotten Daughter from BkMk Press. Her previous books are Zoo (Arkansas 1999), winner of the Ezra Pound Poetry Award from Truman State University and the Sheila Margaret Motton Prize from the New England Poetry Club, and Inverted Fire (BkMk, 1997). Her poems appear in Poetry, The Georgia Review, Boulevard, The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, and Shenandoah, which awarded Friman the 2002 James Boatwright III Prize for Poetry. She has received fellowships from the Indiana Arts Commission and the Arts Council of Indianapolis and has been awarded residencies at many colonies including MacDowell and Yaddo. In 2003-04, she was named Writer in Residence at the Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest in Kentucky. She has won three prizes from the Poetry Society of America and in 2001-02, was named to the Georgia Poetry Circuit. Professor Emerita at the University of Indianapolis, Friman now lives in Milledgeville, Georgia, where she is Poet-In-Residence at Georgia College and State University.

April 19, Thursday: Heather McHugh, Poet

7:30 pm, Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, Goldwin Smith

Robert Chasen Memorial Poetry Reading

"If ours were a more reverent country than the one John Ashbery and Heather McHugh gorgeously exemplify, these two would long ago have been made to endure the title of national treasures...our fractious, healing, double-dealing, on-the-make vernacular is nowhere so richly turned to account as in the poems they have been giving us for years."

–Linda Gregerson, New York Times

Heather McHugh lives in Seattle where since 1984 she has served as Milliman Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the University of Washington's Creative Writing Program. Her selected poems, Hinge & Sign, was short-listed for the National Book Award in 2001, and her most recent collection EYESHOT was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Her translation of Paul Celan (with husband Nikolai Popov) won the International Griffin Poetry Prize in 2001. She has published more than 10 books of poetry, translation and essays, and is the editor of the 2007 edition of Best American Poems. In 2006 she was named one of the first of the new United States Artists' fellows.  In 2001 she was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and from 2000 to 2006 she served as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. 

For more information about the Spring 2007 Reading Series or about on-campus parking, contact Laurel Guy at lrg29@cornell.edu or call 607.255.6800.