Visiting Writers 2002 - 2003
Stanley Kunitz
Thursday, September 26, 2002
7:30 p.m., Thomas Great Hall
Poet Mark Strand has said, "Kunitz is one of America's great poets. Most poets dry up at 50. • Lucky ones last until 60. Few are still producing at 70. For him to be writing poems at 90 is just incredible." Now 97, Stanley Kunitz was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 2000-01. His works include The Collected Poems andPassing Through: The Later Poems, New andSelected. He has received the Pulitzer and Bollingen Prizes as well as a National Medal of the Arts. (Reading sponsored by the Marianne Moore Fund for the Study of Poetry)
Nadine Gordimer
Thursday, October 3, 2002
7:30 p.m., Thomas Great Hall
"Heartbreaking, unforgettable" was how Doris Lessing described South African Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer's most recent novel The Pickup. Gordimer's other novels include Burger's Daughter, A Sport of Nature, None to Accompany Me and The House Gun. Her story collections include Jump and Other Stories, and her works of nonfiction prose include The Essential Gesture and Living in Hope and History: Notes From Our Century. (Reading sponsored by the Lucy Martin Donnelly Women Writers Series).
Sandra Cisneros
Tuesday, October 8, 2002,
7:30 p.m., Thomas Great Hall
Sandra Cisneros' new novel Caramelo has been described as "a dazzling weave of passion, poignancy and the stuff of life," telling the multigenerational story of a Mexican-American family. Cisneros is the author of three books of poetry and two books of fiction, including My Wicked, Wicked Ways , The House on Mango Street , Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories and Loose Woman. She has received a Lannan Literary Award, the American Book Award and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. (Reading sponsored by the Lucy Martin Donnelly Women Writers Series)
Umberto Eco
Tuesday, October 22, 2002
7:30 p.m., Thomas Great Hall
Italian semiotician and fiction writer Umberto Eco is the author of three best-selling novels — The Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum and The Island of the Day Before. His books of essays include Five Moral Pieces, Kant and the Platypus and Travels in Hyperreality. His new novel Baudolino, concerning the sack of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade in 1204, was called "dazzling fireworks" in Welt am Sonntag (Germany). (Reading sponsored by the Gelllert Fund)
Derek Walcott
Tuesday, April 8, 2003
7:30 p.m., Thomas Great Hall
"The Walcott tine is still sponsored by Shakespeare and the Bible, happy to surprise by fine excess," wrote Seamus Heaney of the work of St. Lucian poet and painter Derek Walcott, who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992. His Collected Poems 1948 - 1984 was published in 1986; his subsequent work s include the book-length poems Omeros Tiepolo's Hound as well as The Bounty and Odyssey: a Stage Version. The author of numerous plays both in verse and in prose and founder of the Poets' Theatre at Boston University, Walcott has been director of the Trini dad Theatre Workshop. His book of essays is What the Twilight Says. (Reading sponsored by by the Marianne Moore Fund for the Study of Poetry)
Four Fiction Writers
Tuesday, April 15, 2003
7:30 p.m., Thomas Great Hall
Four writers who will teach a fiction master in the Creative Writing Program at Bryn Mawr College in spring 2003 read from their own work. Peter Cameron's works of fiction including The City of Your Final Destination , The Half You Don't Know: New and Selected Stories. Andorra and The Weekend. Jessica Hagedorn's no> include The Gangster of Love and Dogeaters She is also the editor of Charlie Chan is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian-American Fiction. James Lasdun's story "The Siege" was the basis for a film by Bernardo Bertolucci. His story collections include Delirium Eclipse, Evenings and Besieged; his novel is The Horned Man. Sigrid Nunez's works of fiction include four novels: For Rouenna. Mitz: the Marmoset of Bloomsbury , Naked Sleeper and A Feather on the Breath of God. (Reading Sponsored by the Lucy Martin Donnelly Women Writers Series and the. Whitehill-Linn Fund).
Milton's Samson Agonistes: aReading with Claire Bloom, John
Neville and Others, Direct by Robert Scanlan Tuesday, April 22, 2003 7:30 p.m., Thomas Great Hall
"The last great English play in verse," as American poet Robert Lowell described it, Milton's dramatic poem is based on the bit story of Samson. This rarely performed play contains poetry of a grandeur and brilliance not seen since Shakespeare, as the blinded hero confronts his aged father, his treacherous wife and a heartless giant. Each encounter represents a step along the way to Samson's final act of defiance, self-redemption and sacrifice. Samuel Johnson said the play "has a beginning and an end of which Aristotle himself could not have disapproved." (Reading sponsored by the Creative Writing Program, the Marianne Moore Fund for the Study of Poetry, the Department of English, the Bryn Mawr Center for Visual Culture, and the Provost’sOffice).
Ian McEwan
Tuesday, April 29, 2003
7:30 pm Thomas Great Hall
One of England's most gifted contemporary fiction writers, Ian McEwan is the author of Atonement, the best selling novel that led the Sunday Times (London) to declare, "The narrative ... smolders with slow-burning menace ... Never has McEwan shown himself to be more in sympathy with the vulnerability of the human heart." Among his other novels are Amsterdam (A Booker Prize winner), Black Dogs, The Innocent and The Child in Time; his two story collections include First Love, Last Rites and In Between the Sheets. (Reading Sponsored by the Whitehill-Linn Fund).