2009-10 Reading Series
Lorrie Moore
Wednesday | Sept. 23, 2009 | 7:30 p.m. | Great Hall
Lorrie Moore is the author of the story collections Birds of America and Self-Help, and the novels Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, Anagrams, and, most recently, A Gate at the Stairs. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Best American Short Stories, and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani has called her work “at once sad and funny, lyrical and prickly…virtuosic [and] wise.”
Suzan-Lori Parks
Tuesday | Oct. 20, 2009 | 7:30 p.m. | Great Hall
Playwright Suzan-Lori Parks is the first African American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize in Drama, for her play Topdog/Underdog. She has also received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. Her project 365 Days/365 Plays created one of the largest grassroots collaborations in theater history. Her other plays include In the Blood, Venus, The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, and The America Play. Her first novel is Getting Mother’s Body, and she has also written a musical, Ray Charles Live! Her new plays are Father Comes Home From the Wars (Parts 1, 8 & 9) and Snake.
This reading is made possible by the Miriam Schultz Grunfeld Lectureship Fund.
Marilyn Nelson
Thursday | Oct. 29, 2009 | 7:30 p.m. | Wyndham Ely Room
Poet, translator, and three-time National Book Award finalist Marilyn Nelson is the author of 12 books, including The Homeplace, The Fields Of Praise: New And Selected Poems, Carver: A Life In Poems (a Newbery Honor Book), Fortune’s Bones, A Wreath For Emmett Till, and The Cachoiera Tales and Other Poems (finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award). Poet Joyce S. Brown writes, “She is moral, loving, visionary…Reading her work is as much a lesson in history and in human nature as it is a lesson in poetry.”
This reading is made possible by the Jane Flanders Fund and the Marianne Moore Fund for the Study of Poetry.
George Saunders
Monday | Nov. 9, 2009 | 7:30 p.m. | Wyndham Ely Room
Short-story writer and essayist George Saunders’ work appears regularly in The New Yorker, Harper’s Monthly, and GQ. Tobias Wolff says he is “a writer of arresting brilliance and originality,” and the New York Times says “he writes like the illegitimate offspring of Nathaniel West and Kurt Vonnegut.” He is a four-time National Magazine Award winner, and his most recent collection of stories, In Persuasion Nation, was a finalist for the 2007 The Story Prize.
Julia Alvarez: Words and Music
Tuesday | Dec. 1, 2009 | 7:30 p.m. | Great Hall
Julia Alvarez is the author of books of fiction including How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, In the Time of the Butterflies, and Saving the World; collections of poetry including The Woman I Kept to Myself, Homecoming: New and Selected Poems, and The Other Side; the nonfiction work Once Upon a Quinceañera: Coming of Age in the USA; and books for children. In addition to Alvarez reading from her own work, this evening will feature L’Ensemble—soprano Ida Faiella, violinist Barry Finclair, and pianist Charles Abramovic—performing Haverford College Professor of Music Heidi Jacob’s settings of Alvarez’s poems.
This reading is co-presented by Bryn Mawr College and Haverford College, and is made possible by the Haverford College Music Department and the Jane Flanders Fund and the Marianne Moore Fund for the Study of Poetry.
Mark Strand
Thursday | March 25, 2010 | 7:30 p.m. | Wyndham Ely Room
Mark Strand is the author of 12 books of poetry, including New Selected Poems, Man and Camel, Blizzard of One (recipient of the Pulitzer Prize), Dark Harbor, and The Continuous Life, as well as volumes of prose, translations, and art criticism. In 1990 he was named Poet Laureate of the United States. Poet Louise Glück writes of his work, “it is our misfortune to identify worldliness and irony with lack of substance; in poetry at this level, they manifest profound wisdom and daring.”
This reading is made possible by the Jane Flanders Fund and the Marianne Moore Fund for the Study of Poetry.
Peter Matthiessen
Thursday | April 15, 2010 | 7:30 p.m. | Great Hall
A founding editor of The Paris Review, Peter Matthiessen is a recipient of National Book Awards in both nonfiction (for The Snow Leopard, in 1980) and fiction—most recently this past year for his trilogy Shadow Country: A New Rendering of the Watson Legend. Publishers Weekly says of this novel that it is “a touchstone of modern American literature.” Matthiessen’s other books of fiction include At Play in the Fields of the Lord and Far Tortuga, and of nonfiction include Blue Meridian, The Tree Where Man Was Born, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, and, most recently, End of the Earth: Voyage to Antarctica.