2013-14 Reading Series
Kay Ryan
Thursday | Sept. 26 | 2013 | 7:30 p.m. | Goodhart Music Room
Kay Ryan served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2008 to 2010. She is the author of eight books of poems, including The Best of It: New and Selected Poems, winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize. Ryan is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Poet J.D. McClatchy has said: “Her poems are compact, exhilarating, strange affairs. She is an anomaly in today’s literary culture: as intense and elliptical as Dickinson, as buoyant and rueful as Frost.”
This reading has been made possible with the support of the Jane Flanders Fund and the Marianne Moore Fund for the Study of Poetry.
Robert Stone
Thursday | Oct. 3, 2013 | 7:30 pm | Great Hall
Fiction writer Robert Stone is the author of two collections of stories and six novels—including Dog Soldiers, winner of the National Book Award and one of Time Magazine’s “All-Time 100 Novels.” In 2006, he published a memoir of his time with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, Prime Green. A two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, he is the recipient of Guggenheim and NEH grants. In fall 2013, he will publish his first novel in a decade, Death of the Brown-Haired Girl.
Deborah Eisenberg
Thursday | Oct. 24, 2013 | 7:30 pm | Goodhart Music Room
Short story writer Deborah Eisenberg is the author of six books: the story collections Transactions in a Foreign Currency, Under the 82nd Airborne, All Around Atlantis, Twilight of the Superheroes, and two retrospectives, The Stories (So Far) of Deborah Eisenberg and The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg. She has been awarded a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, a Whiting Award and the Rea Award for the Short Story. Writing in the New York Times, Jim Shepard has called Eisenberg’s stories “spirited and masterly road maps through sad and forbidding and desolate terrain.”
Robert Hass
Thursday | Feb. 6, 2014 | 7:30 pm | Goodhart Music Room
Poet, translator and essayist Robert Hass is the author of eight books of poetry, including Time and Materials: Poems 1997–2005, which won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. He has been awarded a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, and has twice won the National Book Critics’ Circle Award. Writing in the New York Times Book Review, poet Michael Hofman has said, “It has always been Mr. Hass’s aim to get the whole man, head and heart and hands and everything else, into his poetry.” Hass served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997.
This reading has been made possible with the support of the Jane Flanders Fund and the Marianne Moore Fund for the Study of Poetry.
Kevin Young
Thursday | Feb. 20, 2014 | 7:30 pm | Goodhart Music Room
Kevin Young is the author of seven books of poems: Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels, Dear Darkness, For the Confederate Dead, Black Maria, Jelly Roll: A Blues, To Repel Ghosts, and Most Way Home, which was selected for the National Poetry Series. Writing of his work, the poet Lucille Clifton has said, “This poet’s gift of storytelling and understanding of the music inherent in the oral tradition of language re-creates for us an inner history which is compelling and authentic and American.”
This reading has been made possible with the support of the Jane Flanders Fund and the Marianne Moore Fund for the Study of Poetry.
Francine Prose
Thursday, March 19, 7:30 pm | Great Hall
Francine Prose is the author of 16 books of fiction, including Blue Angel, a finalist for the National Book Award. Her nonfiction books include Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife and the New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and winner of both the PEN/Translation Prize and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Prose is a former president of PEN American Center. The novelist Larry McMurtry has called her “deft and deep…one of our finest writers.”
Chang-Rae Lee
Thursday | April 17, 2014 | 7:30 pm | Goodhart Music Room
Chang-Rae Lee is the author of five novels, including Native Speaker, winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award. His novel The Surrendered was the winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In the New York Times Book Review, critic Dwight Garner has called Lee “a graceful writer…a deft and original thinker about the vagaries of assimilation—about what it means to feel like a perpetual outsider in your adopted country.” Lee is a professor of creative writing at Princeton University.