Creative Writing Reading Series Opens Sept. 27

Seven prizewinning practitioners of the arts of poetry, memoir, essay and fiction will visit the Bryn Mawr campus this year as part of the Creative Writing Program Reading Series. The diverse group of authors ranges from established literary eminences like Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, novelist E.L. Doctorow and poet Lucille Clifton to rising stars like Olga Grushin, who was recently selected by Granta as one of America's top young novelists. The series, which is free and open to the public, begins on Thursday, Sept. 27, with a reading by two-time Pulitzer winner Richard Wilbur. Names, dates, times and places of the readings:

Richard Wilbur, Thursday, Sept. 27, 7:30 p.m., Ely Room at the Wyndham Alumnae House
Richard Wilbur, two-time recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, is the author of 11 books of poems, including Mayflies: New Poems and Translations and Collected Poems, 1943-2004. He is also the leading English translator of the works of Molière and Racine.

His other works include such children's classics as Opposites and the books of prose Responses: Prose Pieces, 1948-1976 and The Catbird's Song: Prose Pieces, 1963-1995. With Leonard Bernstein and Lillian Hellman he wrote Candide, a comic operetta based on Voltaire's satire. His new translation is of The Theatre of Illusion by Pierre Corneille.

Derek Walcott, Thursday, Oct. 11, 7:30 p.m., Thomas Great Hall
Poet Derek Walcott from St. Lucia received the 1992 Nobel Prize for Literature. Founder of the Trinidad Theatre Workshop, he has distinguished himself in lyric, dramatic and narrative poetry through such works as Dream on Monkey Mountain, Omeros, The Prodigal, Tiepolo's Hound, The Bounty and The Arkansas Testament. His prose works include his Nobel address, "The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory," and What the Twilight Says. His new Selected Poems, edited by Edward Baugh, appeared in the spring of 2007.

Critic Peter Balakian describes Walcott's work as "an epic song that has already taken its place in the history of Western literature."

E. L. Doctorow, Thursday, Nov. 8, 7:30 p.m., Thomas Great Hall
E.L. Doctorow's many novels include The Book of Daniel, Ragtime, Loon Lake, World's Fair, Billy Bathgate, The Waterworks and The March. His stories are gathered in Lives of the Poets: Six Stories and a Novella, and his nonfiction in Reporting the Universe and, most recently, Creationists: Selected Essays, 1993-2006.

Critic John Leonard writes of Doctorow, "In The March, he dreams himself backward from The Book of Daniel to Ragtime to The Waterworks to the Civil War, into the creation myth of the Republic itself, as if to assume the prophetic role of such 19th-century writers as Emerson, Melville, Whitman and Poe."

Lucille Clifton, Thursday, Dec. 6, 7:30 p.m., Ely Room at the Wyndham Alumnae House
Lucille Clifton is the author of 12 collections of poetry and one book of autobiographical prose, including Mercy, Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems, 1988-2000 (recipient of the National Book Award), The Book of Light and Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980 (nominated for a Pulitzer Prize the same year her volume Next: New Poems was nominated). She has also published 19 children's books.

Journalist Donna Seaman has written that "Clifton's poems are lean, agile, and accurate, and there is beauty in their directness and efficiency, an element, too, of surprise."

Olga Grushin, Thursday, Feb. 7, 7:30 p.m., Ely Room at the Wyndham Alumnae House
Recently chosen as one of Granta magazine's "21 Best American Fiction Writers Under 35," and also a recipient of the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award, Olga Grushin was born in Moscow and educated in Prague and at Moscow State University; she also earned a full scholarship to Emory University. She has worked as a researcher, interpreter and editor.

Her first novel, The Dream Life of Sukhanov, was described by critic James Lasdun as being "steeped in the tradition of Gogol, Bulgakov and Nabokov."

Patricia Hampl, Thursday, March 27, 7:30 p.m., Thomas Great Hall
Poet and memoirist Patricia Hampl is the author of books including Woman Before an Aquarium, Blue Arabesque: A Search for the Sublime (about a work by Matisse), I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory, A Romantic Education and Virgin Time: In Search of the Contemplative Life. Her new book is The Florist's Daughter.

Writer Phyllis Rose comments, "I love few writers as I love Patricia Hampl. Reading her, I feel in conversation with a deliciously matured and balanced, lively and comprehensive mind…. Blue Arabesque is a marvel — so free, so inventive and so unpretentiously deep."

James Salter, Thursday, April 17, 7:30 p.m., Thomas Great Hall
Susan Sontag has written, "Salter particularly rewards those for whom reading is an intense pleasure. He is among the very few North American writers all of whose work I want to read, whose as yet unpublished books I wait for impatiently." James Salter is the author of the novels Solo Faces, Light Years, A Sport and a Pastime, The Arm of Flesh (revised as Cassada) and The Hunters, as well as the memoirs Gods of Tin and Burning the Days. His story collections include Dusk and Other Stories (recipient of a PEN/Faulkner Award) and Last Night.

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