2006
Visiting Writers Series at Lyon College2006
Visiting Writers Series at Lyon College
Tuesday, September 19: Novelist Kevin Brockmeier
11 AM lecture in Bevens
7:30 PM reading in Bevens
The Washington Post calls him a “thrilling” storyteller, The Chicago Tribune
gave
him its Nelson Algren Award, and The Oxford American named him one of the Best
Writers of the South. Kevin Brockmeier is the author of the novels The Brief
History
of the Dead and The Truth About Celia, the story collection Things That Fall
From the
Sky, and the children's novels City of Names and Grooves: A Kind of Mystery. His
other awards include three O. Henry Prizes, the Italo Calvino Short Fiction
Award, and
the James MichenerPaul Engle Fellowship. Individual stories have been published
in The
New Yorker, The Georgia Review, The New York Times, McSweeney’s, The Best
American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and broadcast on National
Public
Radio’s Selected Shorts. A graduate of the famous Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where
he
also taught, Brockmeier is a native Arkansan and lives in Little Rock.
Tuesday, October 24: Poet Jason Sommer
11 AM lecture in Bevens
7:30 PM reading in Bevens
Jason Sommer grew up in the Bronx, New York, in a house that held secrets.
Eventually
he learned that his immigrant father, uncle, and aunt had survived labor camps,
including
Auschwitz. Later he would incorporate his family’s stories into award-winning
poems that
have earned him the prestigious Whiting Foundation Writers’ Award, the Anna
Davidson
Rosenberg Award, and the New England Prize, among others. Sommer has been a
playwright, translator, director, and creator of comedy routines he subsequently
performed
on Irish National Television. He is one of the few writers invited to read his
work at the
National Holocaust Museum in Washington DC. His books include The Man Who Sleeps
in My Office, Other People's Troubles, and Lifting the Stone. Individual poems
have
appeared in such publications as The New Republic, Ploughshares, Chicago Review,
and
TriQuarterly. An outstanding undergraduate athlete at Brandies University, he
was later
awarded a Mirrielees Fellowship during his graduate years at Stanford. He is
Professor
of English and Writer-in-Residence at Fontbonne University in St. Louis,
Missouri, where
he lives with his wife and three children.
Tuesday, November 28: Writer-in-Residence Andrea Hollander Budy
11 AM prose reading in Bevens
7:30 PM poetry reading in Bevens (with student writers)
Celebrate the publication of Writer-in-Residence Andrea Hollander Budy’s new
collection of poems, Woman in the Painting, just released by Autumn House Press.
Her previous books include House Without a Dreamer, winner of the Nicholas
Roerich Poetry Prize, and The Other Life, which garnered high praise by
reviewers
in such publications as The Washington Post and The Georgia Review. Budy is
winner of the D. H. Lawrence Fellowship, the Runes Award in Poetry, a Pushcart
Prize for Memoir, and writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the
Arts
and the Arkansas Arts Council. Her poems have been featured by U.S. Poet
Laureates
Rita Dove and Billy Collins. Recent prose and poetry appears in The Georgia
Review,
Poetry, Shenandoah, Five Points, and FIELD. Since 1991, she has taught at Lyon
College, which awarded her the Williamson Prize for Excellence in Teaching.
Students
from Budy’s creative writing workshop will open the evening reading by sharing
poems
they created during the semester.