2017-18 Reading Series
Justin Torres
Wednesday | Sept. 20, 2017 | 7:30 p.m. | Goodhart Music Room
Justin Torres’ debut novel, We the Animals, was championed as an instant classic soon after its publication in 2012. In the New York Times Book Review, critic Joseph Salvatore hailed the book’s “incantatory narrative style… We the Animals is a strobe light of a story, producing lurid and poetic snapshots that start with the narrator and his two brothers as needy children.” A National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, Torres has published stories in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, and Tin House. He teaches English at UCLA.
A. Van Jordan
Wednesday | Oct. 25, 2017 | 7:30 p.m. | Ely Room, Wyndham Alumnae House
A. Van Jordan is the author of four books of poetry, including Rise, winner of the PEN Oakland/ Josephine Miles Award. Writing on Jordan’s work, poet Terrance Hayes says, “With an imagination illuminated by empathy, Jordan inhabits the eye of the camera, the eye of the actor, and the ‘I’ of a viewer tethered to image and history. His terrific poems give shape to lives made of light.” The winner of a Whiting Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, Jordan is the Henry Rutgers Presidential Professor at Rutgers University Newark.
This reading was made possible with the support of the Jane Flanders Fund and the Marianne Moore Fund for the Study of Poetry.
Claire Vaye Watkins
Wednesday | Nov. 15, 2017 | 7:30 p.m. | Ely Room, Wyndham Alumnae House
Novelist and essayist Claire Vaye Watkins is one of the most acclaimed fiction writers of her generation. Her debut story collection, Battleborn, won the Story Prize and the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award. Louise Erdrich calls her debut novel, Gold Fame Citrus, “exhilarating, upsetting, delirious, bold… a head rush of a novel and establishes Watkins as an important new voice in American literature.” A professor at the Helen Zell Writers Program at the University of Michigan, Watkins was recently named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists.
Linda Gregerson
Wednesday | Feb. 14, 2018 | 7:30 p.m. | Goodhart Music Room
Poet Linda Gregerson is the author of two books of criticism and six books of poetry, most recently Prodigal: New and Selected Poems 1976-2014. In The New Yorker, poet Dan Chiasson writes, “Gregerson attains what few contemporary poets even seek: a plausible 'we,' a basis for speaking across the lines of individual circumstance and social identity.” A winner of a Guggenheim, an NEA and the Kingsley Tufts Award, Gregerson directs the Helen Zell Writers Program at the University of Michigan.
This reading was made possible with the support of the Jane Flanders Fund and the Marianne Moore Fund for the Study of Poetry.
Angela Flournoy
Wednesday | Feb. 28, 2018 | 7:30 p.m. | Goodhart Music Room
Fiction writer Angela Flournoy’s debut novel, The Turner House, was one of the most acclaimed books of 2015. It was named finalist for the National Book Award, the PEN/Bingham Prize among many others. Writing in The Nation, critic Hannah Gold says, "Flournoy’s spare, headstrong style enables her to lay bare, without pretensions, a story about the black American diaspora in which slavery, segregation, and gentrification are all joined in a single narrative." Flournoy is currently a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library.
Ocean Vuong
Thursday | April 12, 2018 | 7:30 p.m. | Great Hall (in College Hall)
Ocean Vuong is the author of the poetry collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds, and two chapbooks. He has been the winner of a Whiting Award and a Ruth Lily Fellowship. Michiko Kakutani, chief critic at The New York Times, writes, "There is a powerful emotional undertow to Vuong’s poems that springs from his sincerity and candor, and from his ability to capture specific moments in time with both photographic clarity and a sense of the evanescence of all earthly things." He teaches in the MFA program at UMass Amherst.
This reading has been made possible with the support of the Jane Flanders Fund and the Marianne Moore Fund for the Study of Poetry.
Phil Klay
Wednesday | April 25, 2018 | 7:30 p.m. | Ely Room, Wyndham Alumnae House
Phil Klay’s short story collection, Redeployment, was the winner of the 2014 National Book Award. Writing in The New York Times, Dexter Filkins called the book “the best thing written so far about what America’s recent wars did to people’s souls.” A graduate of Dartmouth College and a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps, Klay served in Iraq’s Anbar Province from January 2007 to February 2008. Winner of the National Book Critic Circle’s John Leonard Award, Klay has published work in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and Newsweek.