2011-12 Reading Series

Jennifer Egan

Wednesday | Sept. 21, 2011 | 7:30 p.m. | Goodhart Music Room

Jennifer Egan is the author of three novels and two collections of short stories, including The Invisible Circus (a film version of which was released in 2001), Look at Me and The Keep. Her most recent book, A Visit From the Goon Squad, was the 2011 winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Writing in the New York Review of Books, Cathleen Schine has called Egan “one of the most talented writers [working] today.” 

Nathan Englander

Wednesday | Oct. 5, 2011 | 7:30 p.m. | Goodhart Music Room

Nathan Englander’s first book, the story collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, won the Sue Kaufman Prize, the PEN/Malamud award, and was an international bestseller. Of his first novel, The Ministry of Special Cases, Allegra Goodman says, “Englander writes with power and authority…reading the shadow letters on history’s curtain.” A regular contributor to The New Yorker, Englander’s play, The Twenty-Seventh Man, based on a story from his first book, will premier at New York’s The Public Theater in February 2012.

The New American Short Story

Wednesday | Oct. 26, 2011 | 7:30 p.m. | Great Hall

Five of the most important short fiction writers working today—Frank O’Connor Award finalist Robin Black and four of the New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 honorees—Chris Adrian, David Bezmozgis, Rivka Galchen and Karen Russell—will discuss the place of the short story in America, as well as their work and influences. The event will be moderated by short story writer and Bryn Mawr Creative Writing Program Director Daniel Torday. 

Natasha Trethewey

Wednesday | Nov. 2, 2011 | 7:30 p.m. | Goodhart Music Room

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey is the author of the memoir, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and three collections of verse: Domestic Work, Belloc’s Ophelia, and Native Guard. Rita Dove says Trethewey’s poetry “renders the unsuspecting yearnings and tremulous hopes that accompany our most private thoughts—reclaiming for us that interior life where the true self flourishes.” She is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the NEA.

This reading has been made possible with the support of the Jane Flanders Fund and the Marianne Moore Fund for the Study of Poetry.

Karen Russell

Wednesday | Nov. 16, 2011 | 7:30 p.m. | Great Hall

Fiction writer Karen Russell is the author of a story collection St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves and the novel Swamplandia!, a New York Times bestseller. She has been named one of the New Yorker’s 20 Under 40, a Granta Best Young American Novelist, and one of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35. Her stories have appeared three times in the Best American Short Stories anthologies. The recipient of a Guggenheim, Russell is Bryn Mawr’s Distinguished Visiting Writer in the fall of 2011.

Tom Sleigh

Thursday | March 22, 2011 | 7:30 p.m. | Goodhart Music Room

Poet, dramatist and essayist Tom Sleigh is the author of a book of nonfiction, Interview with a Ghost, and seven books of verse, including, most recently, Army Cats. Seamus Heaney says his poetry “refuses to cut emotional corners and yet achieves a sense of lyric absolution.” Sleigh has been the winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the inaugural John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

This reading has been made possible with the support of the Jane Flanders Fund and the Marianne Moore Fund for the Study of Poetry.

Alice McDermott

Wednesday | April 11, 2012 | 7:30 p.m. | Goodhart Music Room

Alice McDermott is the author of six novels: A Bigamist’s Daughter; the Pulitzer Prize-finalists That Night, At Weddings and Wakes and After This; Child of My Heart; and Charming Billy, winner of the 1998 National Book Award. Writing in the New York Times, critic Michiko Kakutani says, “McDermott writes with wisdom and grace, refusing to sentimentalize her characters, even as she forces us to recognize their decency and goodness.” The winner of a Whiting Award, McDermott teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.

Kimiko Hahn

Thursday | April 19, 2012 |  7:30 p.m. | Goodhart Music Room

Kimiko Hahn is the author of nine volumes of poetry, most recently Toxic Flora. She is the winner of the PEN/Voelcker Award, the American Book Award, and the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize. The poet Mark Doty has praised her work for its “rigorous intelligence, fierce anger, and deep vulnerability.” Hahn’s poems appear in The New Yorker, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and many other magazines, and she is a Distinguished Professor in the English department at Queens College/CUNY.

This reading has been made possible with the support of the Jane Flanders Fund and the Marianne Moore Fund for the Study of Poetry.