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Rick Moody

Thursday | Sept. 16, 2010 | 7:30 p.m. | Goodhart Music Room

Rick Moody is the author of three collections of short fiction, a memoir, and five novels, including Garden State, Purple America, The Diviners, The Ice Storm (a film version of which was directed by Ang Lee) and, most recently, The Four Fingers of Death. Writing in The Village Voice, Lydia Millet has called Moody “a self-styled avenging angel of highbrow literary cool.” He has been the winner of The Paris Review’s Aga Khan Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among many other awards, and his book The Black Veil was winner of the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for excellence in the memoir. 

Charles Simic

Thursday | Nov. 11, 2010 | 7:30 p.m. | Wyndham Ely Room

Poet Charles Simic’s epigrammatic, dreamlike and mordantly-humorous poems have made him one of this country’s most distinctive lyric voices. Among his 18 books of poems are That Little Something, My Noiseless Entourage, and The World Doesn’t End: Prose Poems, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize. He has also published prose books including The Renegade: Writings on Poetry and a Few Other Things, Memory Piano, Metaphysician in the Dark and A Fly In My Soup. He has served as Poet Laureate of the United States (2007-8), and has received two PEN translation awards and a MacArthur Fellowship. 

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

Ha Jin

Thursday | Dec. 2, 2010 | 7:30 p.m. | Goodhart Music Room

Novelist, short story writer and poet Ha Jin has been the winner of the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Writing in the New York Times, Francine Prose says “like Isaac Babel, Jin tells the reader precisely as much as is needed to make his deceptively simple fiction resonate on many levels: the personal, the historical, the political.” Jin is the author of 14 books, including the novels Waiting, War Trash, and A Free Life, and, most recently, the story collection A Good Fall.

John Guare

Tuesday | April 5, 2011 | 7:30 p.m. | Great Hall

John Guare’s plays include Landscape of the Body, House of Blue Leaves (Obie/NY Drama Critics Circle Award Best Play), Two Gentlemen of Verona (Tony Award/NY Drama Critics Circle Award Best Musical), Six Degrees of Separation (Obie/NY Drama Critics Circle Award; London’s Olivier Award Best Play), and Atlantic City (NY/LA Film Critics Award/Oscar nomination Best Screenplay). He won the 2003 PEN Master Dramatist Award, the 2004 Gold Medal in Drama from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the 2005 Obie for sustained excellence. He is a council member of the Dramatists Guild and co-edits the Lincoln Center Theater Review.

Karl Kirchwey

Tuesday | April 12, 2011 | 7:30 p.m. | Wyndham Ely Room

Karl Kirchwey is the author of six books of poems, including The Engrafted Word, The Happiness of This World: Poetry and Prose, and, forthcoming in the spring of 2011, Mount Lebanon. Also forthcoming is his translation of French poet Paul Verlaine’s first book, as Poems Under Saturn. His reviews and essays have appeared in Parnassus, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere. Professor of the Arts at Bryn Mawr College, he is the Andrew Heiskell Arts Director at the American Academy in Rome for 2010-13. 

This program has been made possible with the support of the Jane Flanders Fund.

In the Frame: Women Poets Write About Visual Art

Wednesday | March 23, 2011 | 7:30 p.m. | McPherson Auditorium, Goodhart Hall

Poets Jorie Graham, Rachel Hadas, and Susan Wheeler will read from their poems about works of visual art, accompanied by images of the work. K. Laurence Stapleton Professor of English Jane Hedley as moderator, together with critics Nick Halpern and Willard Spiegelman, who are the three editors of the recent anthology of essays, In the Frame: Women’s Ekphrastic Poetry From Marianne Moore to Susan Wheeler, will then join critic Stephen Yenser and the three poets for a panel discussion. 

This program has been made possible with the support of the Jane Flanders Fund, the Marianne Moore Fund for the Study of Poetry, and the Bryn Mawr College Center for Visual Culture.

Jhumpa Lahiri 

Wednesday | March 16, 2011 | 7:30 p.m. | McPherson Auditorium, Goodhart Hall

Jhumpa Lahiri’s first book, Interpreter of Maladies, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the PEN/Hemingway Award and The New Yorker Debut of the Year. Her novel The Namesake was the basis for a major motion picture directed by Mira Nair, and was named a New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist. In the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani says Lahiri’s most recent story collection, Unaccustomed Earth, “possesses the elegiac and haunting power of tragedy—a testament to her emotional wisdom and consummate artistry as a writer.”

Jamaica Kincaid

Thursday | Sept. 30, 2011 | 7:30 p.m. | Great Hall

Jamaica Kincaid is the author of a dozen works of fiction and nonfiction, including the memoir My Brother, a short story collection titled At the Bottom of the River, and the novels Lucy, Annie John, Mr. Potter, and The Autobiography of My Mother, a national bestseller. Born in Antigua, Kincaid is former staff writer for The New Yorker and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Ian Frazier writes that Kincaid is “a writer of boldness and encouragement who keeps on showing us the ever-dawning possibilities in writing and in the world.”