October 29, 2007
Lyon College News Bureau

The Lyon College Contemporary Writers Series will welcome novelist and short story writer John J. Clayton on Tuesday, Nov. 13. He will speak on the art of writing at 11 a.m. in the Bevens Music Room, and will give a fiction reading at 7:30 p.m., also in Bevens.

One critic called John J. Clayton “a masterful observer of the modern world, with all its fears and neuroses—the threats that plague us from afar and from within, and the corruptions that contaminate not only our institutions, but also our spirits.”

Clayton is the author of three novels and three short fiction collections, most recently the novel, Kuperman’s Fire, and the story collection, Wrestling with Angels. His prize-winning fiction is included in O. Henry Prize Stories, Best American Short Stories, the Pushcart Prize anthology, and has been read at Symphony Space in New York City and aired on National Public Radio as part of the series Selected Shorts.

Clayton is the editor of the Heath Introduction to Fiction, a college textbook, and author of Gestures of Healing, a psychological study of modern British and American fiction, and Saul Bellow: In Defense of Man, winner of several awards in literary criticism.

He has taught modern literature and fiction writing at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, since 1969 and was recently a Visiting Professor of creative writing at Mount Holyoke College.

The Lyon College Contemporary Writers Series, the Visiting Fellowship in Creative Writing, and the Heasley Prize Reading Series, all provide outstanding opportunities to anyone interested in reading – or writing – fiction, poetry, drama and creative non-fiction.

For more information on the Contemporary Writers Series, contact Writer-in-Residence Andrea Hollander Budy at ahbudy@lyon.edu.

John J. Clayton