 |
|
|
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
Distinguished Writers Series, Spring 2021 Visitors have never been permitted to see the most magical part of the Hunter MFA, the evenings when a famous writer visits a class and engages with our talented ambitious students. But now we are in the age of Zoom and we will admit you as a trusted visitor. R.O. Kwon Date: Tuesday, February 23, 2021, at 6:30pm Location: The Zoom Room - Click to ENTER
R.O. Kwon's nationally bestselling first novel, The Incendiaries, was published by Riverhead (US) and Virago/Little Brown (UK), and is being translated into seven languages. Named a best book of the year by over forty publications, The Incendiaries received the Housatonic Book Award and was a finalist or nominated for seven other prizes, including the National Book Critics Circle Award for Best First Book and Los Angeles Times First Book Prize. Kwon was named one of four "writers to watch" by The New York Times. She coedited Kink, which is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster in 2021. Kwon's writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Paris Review, on NPR, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Yaddo, MacDowell, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the Sewanee Writers' Conference. Born in Seoul, Kwon has lived most of her life in the United States.
Marie Mutsuki Mockett Date: Thursday, March 4, 2021, at 6:30pm Location: The Zoom Room - Click to ENTER
Marie Mutsuki Mockett's latest book, American Harvest, is set in seven agricultural and heartland states. It was published by Graywolf Press in 2020 and was a finalist for the Lukas Prize for Nonfiction under the former title A Kernel in God's Eye. Her memoir, Where the Dead Pause and the Japanese Say Goodbye, explores how the Japanese cope with grief and tragedy, set against the backdrop of the 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster in Tohoku, Japan, and her family's 350 year old Buddhist temple. The memoir was a New York Times Editors' Choice, a Barnes and Noble Discover Pick, a Finalist for the 2016 PEN Open Book Award, a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2015 and a Finalist for the Indies Choice Best Book for Adult Nonfiction for 2016. Marie received her MFA from the Bennington Writers Seminars and teaches fiction and nonfiction at the Rainier Writing Workshop, in Tacoma, Washington. For the 2019-2020 academic year, she was a Visiting Writer in the MFA program at Saint Mary's College in Moraga, California. She lives in San Francisco.
Helen Macdonald Date: Tuesday, March 16, 2021, at 5:30pm Location: The Zoom Room - Click to ENTER
Helen Macdonald is best known for H is for Hawk, which won the 2014 Samuel Johnson Prize and Costa Book Award. In 2016, it also won the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger in France. Her other books include Shaler's Fish (2001), Falcon (2006), and her most recent, Vesper Flights (2020). Macdonald has written and narrated several radio programs, and appeared in the BBC Four documentary series, Birds Britannia, in 2010. She also helped make the film "10 X Murmuration" with filmmaker Sarah Wood as part of a 2015 exhibition at the Brighton Festival. In H is for Hawk: A New Chapter, part of BBC's Natural World series in 2017, she trained a new goshawk chick. Presently, Macdonald is an Affiliated Research Scholar in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge.
Victoria Chang Date: Tuesday, March 23, 2021, at 6:30pm Location: The Zoom Room - Click to ENTER
Victoria Chang's fifth and most recent book of poems, OBIT, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2020. Her prior book of poems, Barbie Chang, was also published by Copper Canyon, in 2017. Her third book of poetry, The Boss, was published by McSweeney's in 2013 and won a PEN Center USA literary award and California Book Award. Her first book, Circle, 2005, won the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, Virginia Quarterly Review, Slate, Ploughshares, and The Nation, and Tin House. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2017, a Lannan Residency Fellowship in 2020, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Fellowship in 2017, a Poetry Society of America Alice Fay di Castagnola Award in 2018, as well as a Pushcart Prize and a MacDowell Fellowship. She lives in Los Angeles where she is the Program Chair of Antioch University's MFA Program.
Carl Phillips Location: The Zoom Room - Click to ENTER
Referred to as "one of America's most original, influential, and productive of lyric poets," Carl Phillips is the author of a dozen books of poetry and two works of criticism. His recent books of poetry are Pale Colors in a Tall Field (2020), Wild Is the Wind (2018), Reconnaissance (2015), Silverchest (2013, nominated for the Griffin Prize), Double Shadow (2011, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry and a finalist for the National Book Award), and Speak Low (2009, finalist for the National Book Award). Phillips's honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Library of Congress. He is the recipient of the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Academy of American Poets Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and he has been inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2006, and since 2011 he has served as the judge for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. He lives in St. Louis, Missouri, where he is Professor of English at Washington University.
Distinguished Writers Series, Fall 2020 Alex Halberstadt Date: Thursday, September 17, 2020, at 6:30pm See the event above. There have been stacks of great reviews to quote from but we choose the celebrated writer John Jeremiah Sullivan, to sum up the magic Halberstadt has wrought. "I remember being in a bar with Alex Halberstadt almost twenty years ago, talking about our families, when he said, 'Did I ever tell you my grandfather was Stalin's bodyguard?' He hadn't. I suggested that he write a book about it. Not in my most hopeful imaginings could that book have turned out to be as surprising, sad, funny, and engrossing as the one he wrote. This is history as memoir, and vice versa. Describing Russia in the twentieth century as a place where 'the buffer between history and biography became nearly imperceptible,' he made me feel how this is true of all places, for all of us."
Hernan Diaz Date: Tuesday, October 6, 2020, at 6:30pm See the event above. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, Hernan Diaz has published stories and essays in Cabinet, The New York Times, The Kenyon Review, Playboy, Granta, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. His first novel, In the Distance, was the winner of the Saroyan International Prize, the Cabell Award, and the New American Voices Award, among other distinctions. It was also a Publishers Weekly Top 10 Book of the Year, one of Lit Hub's Top 20 Books of the Decade, and a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. He is the recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award and one of this year's fellows at the New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.
Major Jackson Date: Thursday, October 29, 2020, at 6:30pm See the event above. Major Jackson is the author of five books of poetry, including The Absurd Man (2020), Roll Deep (2015), Holding Company (2010), Hoops (2006) and Leaving Saturn (2002), which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems. His edited volumes include: Best American Poetry 2019, Renga for Obama, and Library of America's Countee Cullen: Collected Poems. A recipient of fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Major Jackson has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Writers' Award, and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. Major Jackson lives in South Burlington, Vermont, where he is the Richard A. Dennis Professor of English and University Distinguished Professor at the University of Vermont. He serves as the Poetry Editor of The Harvard Review.
Claudia Rankine Date: Thursday, November 19, 2020, at 6:30pm Location: The Zoom Room - Click to ENTER
Recipient of the 2016 MacArthur Fellowship, Claudia Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry including Citizen: An American Lyric and Don't Let Me Be Lonely; two plays including Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue; and is the editor of several anthologies including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind. Citizen: An American Lyric was the winner of the 2015 Forward Prize for Best Collection, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry (it was also a finalist in the criticism category, making it the first book in the award's history to be a double nominee), the NAACP Image Award, the PEN Open Book Award, and the LA Times Book Award for poetry. She lives in New Haven, CT and teaches at Yale University as the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry.
Location: The Zoom Room - Click to ENTER
ZZ Packer's collection of short stories Drinking Coffee Elsewhere won the Commonwealth First Fiction Award, an ALEX Award and was a National Book Award 5 under 35 winner. It became a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner award, was a New York Times Notable Book of 2004, and was selected for the Today Show Book Club by John Updike. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, Story, Ploughshares, Granta, Zoetrope All-Story, Best American Short Stories 2000 and Best American Short Stories 2003 and, 100 Years of The Best American Short Stories published in 2015. Her non-fiction has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post Magazine, The Believer, The American Prospect, The Oxford American, The Guardian, and The New York Times Book Review. She has appeared on MSNBC as a Huffington Post contributor. She was a Stanford Wallace Stegner Fellow, a Princeton Lewis Center for the Arts Hodder Fellow, and a Lillian Golay Knafel fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard.
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
