NOVELIST JANE ALISON TO READ NEXT THURSDAY

photo: Alex Wall

Critically acclaimed author Jane Alison will give a reading at Bryn Mawr on Thursday, Sept. 29, at 7:30 p.m., in the Ely Room of Wyndham. The reading is free and open to the public.

Alison's appearance opens the College's yearlong Creative Writing Program Reading Series, with a roster of award-winning poets, fiction and nonfiction writers, and playwrights.

In her debut novel The Love-Artist, Alison imagines the Roman poet Ovid's fascination with the barbarian sorceress Xenia, combining facts from the life of Ovid with the myth of Medea. The New York Times describes Alison's voice as "wonderfully seductive … at once modern and archaic, lyrical and potent." Published in 2001, The Love-Artist has been translated into five languages.

Alison's second work of fiction, The Marriage of the Sea, is set in Venice and New Orleans and involves architecture, painting and science, as well as romance and separation. The title of her third novel, Natives and Exotics, refers to the lives of three relatives who permanently affect the foreign environments in which they live: Mr. Clarence, who in the 1800s emigrates with his foster son, George, from Scotland to the Portuguese Azores and then to Australia; his great-great-granddaughter, Violet, who lives in the bush in Australia and longs to travel; and Violet's granddaughter, Alice, who because of her father's work with the U.S. State Department has traveled extensively by the age of nine.

Alison was born in Canberra, Australia, but grew up in the United States and other locales related to her parents' work with the Foreign Service. In addition to her three novels, she has written biographies for children, and her short fiction and critical writing have appeared in Seed: A Magazine of Culture and Science and Postscript: Essays on Film and the Humanities. Recently, she edited a critical series on women writers.

Alison, who has taught at Columbia University, Barnard College and Bryn Mawr, currently divides her time between Germany and Queens University in Charlotte, N.C., where she teaches fiction in the graduate program in creative writing.

Alison's reading at Bryn Mawr is sponsored by the Lucy Martin Donnelly Women Writers Series Fund.

<<Back to Bryn Mawr Now 9/22/2005

Next story>>