SLU Writers Series
St. Lawrence University Writers Series, 2009-2010
Coordinator for Fall: Professor Natalia Singer, Department of English
Wednesday, September 9 8 P.M. Sykes Common Room
Francine Prose
Francine Prose's most recent novel, Goldengrove, is set in Upstate New York at Mirror Lake, and her most recent nonfiction book, Reading Like a Writer, was a New York Times bestseller. She is the author of twelve novels, including Blue Angel, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and A Changed Man, which was the first recipient of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize in fiction. She has published two short story collections; a collection of novellas; a biography of the painter Caravaggio; a travel book, Sicilian Odyssey; four children's books; and a meditation on the deadly sin, Gluttony. Her stories, reviews and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Harper's, Best American Short Stories, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New York Observer, Art News, The Yale Review and The New Republic. She lives in New York City.
Tuesday, September 29 8 P.M. Sykes Common Room
Steve Almond
Steve Almond is the author of two story collections, My Life in Heavy Metal and The Evil B.B. Chow, the novel Which Brings Me to You (with Julianna Baggott) and the non-fiction book Candyfreak. Of his most recent book, Not That You Asked: Rants, Exploits, and Obsessions, Kirkus Reviews writes, "Whether bemoaning the inanity of reality television, justifying his love for the cheese-metal band Tesla or good-naturedly ragging on Oprah Winfrey, he scores big in every chapter." He lives in Boston.
Tuesday, October 20 8 P.M. Sykes Common Room
Scott Russell Sanders
Scott Russell Sanders is the author of twenty books of fiction and nonfiction, including Staying Put, Hunting for Hope and A Private History of Awe, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. In his latest book, A Conservationist Manifesto, which was published on Earth Day 2009, Sanders offers his vision for a shift from a consumer society to a sustainable one. Sanders is widely admired for his essays about the human place in nature, the pursuit of social justice, the relation between culture and geography, and the search for a spiritual path. Among his honors are the Lannan Literary Award, the John Burroughs Essays Award, the Mark Twain Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Tuesday, November 10 8 P.M. Sykes Common Room
Nathaniel Mackey
Nathaniel Mackey is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Splay Anthem, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2006. In addition, he is the author of an ongoing prose work, From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, of which four volumes have been published, most recently Bass Cathedral; and two books of criticism, most recently Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews. He edits the literary magazine Hambone and coedited, with Art Lange, the anthology Moment's Notice: Jazz in Poetry and Prose. A past recipient of the Whiting Writers' Award and a member of the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets, Professor Mackey teaches at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Coordinator for Spring, Associate Professor, Paul Graham, Department of English
Thursday, February 25, 2010 8 P.M. Sykes Common Room
Antonya Nelson
Antonya Nelson is the author of nine books of fiction, including Some Fun and Nothing Right. One of the most critically acclaimed short story writers in the U.S., Nelson has been the recipient of the Rea Award for Short Fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the O'Henry Prize, the PEN/Nelson Algren Award, the Flannery O'Connor award and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper's, and many other magazines and anthologies. She teaches at the University of Houston.
Thursday, March 18 8 P.M. Sykes Common Room
Christian Bök
The Sandra P. Nelson Poet
Christian Bök is the author of Crystallography, a pataphysical encyclopedia nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, and Eunoia, which won the Griffin Prize for Poetic Excellence. Bök has created artificial languages for two television shows: Gene Roddenberry's Earth: Final Conflict and Peter Benchley's Amazon. His conceptual artworks, which include books built out of Rubik's cubes and Lego bricks, have appeared in New York City as part of the exhibit Poetry Plastique. A professor of English at the University of Calgary, Bök has earned many accolades for his virtuoso performances of sound poetry. In addition to his reading on Thursday, he will lead a sound workshop on the SLU campus on Friday, March 19.
Thursday, April 8, 2010 8 P.M. Sykes Common Room
Gerald Early
Gerald Early is the author of several works of nonfiction, including The Culture of Bruising: Essays on Prizefighting, Literature, and Modern American Culture, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism; One Nation Under a Groove: Motown and American Culture; and This is Where I Came In: Black America in the 1960s. He edited Best African American Fiction, 2009; Best African American Essays, 2009; and Sammy Davis, Jr. Reader: the Life and Times of the Last Great American. He lives in St. Louis, where he is he Kling Professor of Modern Letters in the English department and director of the Center for the Humanities at Washington University.
Thursday, April 22 8 P.M. Sykes Common Room
Richard Rubin
Viebranz Visiting Professor of Creative Writing
Richard Rubin is the author of the memoir Confederacy of Silence: A True Tale of the New Old South. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Smithsonian and The Atlantic. His New York Times Magazine article "The Ghosts of Emmett Till" was included in The Best American Crime Writing 2006. He has also published fiction in several magazines and journals, including The Oxford American, The Southern Review and The Virginia Quarterly Review. His current project is a nonfiction work about World War I.
For additional information, contact Charlotte Ward, Department of English, 315-229-5125
and http://www.stlawu.edu/english/