Visiting Writers Series Announces Fall 2012 Lineup
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
Novelist Margaret Atwood, former U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky and Whiting Award winner Eduardo Corral will be among the speakers in Butler University’s fall 2012 Vivian S. Delbrook Visiting Writers Series.
Atwood (Sept. 12) will be followed by poetry slam sensation Patricia Smith (Sept. 19), naturalist and writer Peter Steinhart (Oct. 8), Corral (Oct. 24), novelist Yiyun Li (Nov. 8) and Pinsky (Nov. 28).
All events in the series are free and open to the public without tickets. For more information, call (317) 940-9861.
More information about each speaker follows.
Margaret Atwood
7:30 p.m. Sept. 12
Clowes Memorial Hall
Margaret Atwood is the author of more than 50 volumes of poetry, children’s literature, fiction and non-fiction. She is perhaps best known for her novels, which include The Edible Woman (1970), The Handmaid's Tale (1983), The Robber Bride (1994), Alias Grace (1996) and The Blind Assassin, which won the prestigious Booker Prize in 2000. Atwood's dystopic novel Oryx and Crake was published in 2003. The Tent (mini-fictions) and Moral Disorder (short stories) both appeared in 2006. Her most recent volume of poetry, The Door, was published in 2007. Her non-fiction book, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, part of the Massey Lecture series, appeared in 2008, and her most recent novel, The Year of the Flood, in autumn 2009. Her work has been published in more than 40 languages, including Farsi, Japanese, Turkish, Finnish, Korean, Icelandic and Estonian.
Patricia Smith
Sept. 19
Time and location TBA
Patricia Smith’snew book, Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah,explores the second wave of the Great Migration. Shifting from spoken word to free verse to traditional forms, she reveals "that soul beneath the vinyl."
Smith also is the author of Blood Dazzler; Close to Death; Big Towns, Big Talk; Life According to Motown; andTeahouse of the Almighty, a National Poetry Series winner, the Best Poetry Book of 2006 on About.com and a 2007 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and Paterson Poetry Prize winner.
Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, poemmemoirstory, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Chautauqua Literary Journal, TriQuarterly and other journals. Her poem "The Way Pilots Walk" received a Pushcart Prize and is featured in Pushcart Prize XXXII: Best of the Small Presses.
Peter Steinhart
7:30 p.m. Oct. 8
Eidson-Duckwall Recital Hall
Peter Steinhart grew up in California’s Santa Clara Valley and watched it transform from apricot orchards into Silicon Valley. As a freelance writer he specialized in environmental affairs and natural history. His articles and essays have appeared in such publications as Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, Mother Jones, Reader’s Digest and National Wildlife. For 15 years he worked as a field editor and columnist for Audubon Magazine, during which time he was twice a finalist for the National Magazine Award for Essays and Criticism. For two years he was a columnist for California magazine. He has published five books: Tracks in the Sky (wildlife and wetlands along the Pacific Flyway); California’s Wild Heritage (endangered species in the golden state); Two Eagles/Dos Aguilas (biodiversity along the U.S./Mexican borderlands); The Company of Wolves (biology and human understanding of a fabled predator; and (pursuing a life-long artistic practice) The Undressed Art - Why We Draw
Eduardo C. Corral
7:30 p.m. Oct. 24
Eidson-Duckwall Recital Hall
Eduardo C. Corral won a Whiting Award and the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 2011 for Slow Lightning, his book of poems. Corral holds degrees from Arizona State University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, jubilat, New England Review, Ploughshares, Poetry and Post Road. His work has been honored with a "Discovery"/The Nation award and residencies from The MacDowell Colony and Yaddo, the artists’ community.
He has served as the Olive B. O'Connor Fellow in Creative Writing at Colgate University and as the Philip Roth Resident in Creative Writing at Bucknell University. He's the interview editor for Boxcar Poetry Review.
Yiyun Li
7:30 p.m. Nov. 8
Eidson-Duckwall Recital Hall
Yiyun Li grew up in Beijing and came to the United States in 1996. Her stories and essays have been published in The New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, O Henry Prize Stories and elsewhere. She has received fellowships and awards from the Lannan Foundation and Whiting Foundation. Her debut collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, PEN/Hemingway Award, Guardian First Book Award and California Book Award for first fiction; it was also shortlisted for the Kiriyama Prize and the Orange Prize for New Writers.
Her novel, The Vagrants, won the gold medal in the California Book Award competition for fiction. She was selected by Granta as one of the 21 Best Young American Novelists under 35, and was named by The New Yorker as one of the top 20 writers under 40. MacArthur Foundation named her a 2010 fellow. She is a contributing editor to the Brooklyn-based literary magazine A Public Space. She lives in Oakland, Calif., with her husband and their two sons, and teaches at University of California, Davis.
Robert Pinsky
7:30 p.m. Nov. 28
Reilly Room
In 1997, Robert Pinsky was named the United States Poet Laureate and Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. As Poet Laureate, Pinsky founded the Favorite Poem Project, in which thousands of Americans of varying backgrounds, ages and from every state shared their favorite poems.
He is the author of 19 books, most of which are collections of his own poetry. His published work also includes critically acclaimed translations, including a collection of poems by Czeslaw Milosz and Dante Alighieri. He teaches at Boston University and is the poetry editor at Slate.
Media contact:
Marc Allan
mallan@butler.edu
(317) 940-9822
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