2011-12 Writers Series

The University of Richmond’s Department of English has announced that it will bring nine writers to campus during the 2011-2012 academic year for its annual Writers Series.

The series is designed to expose Richmond students and the greater university community to living writers. The readings and talks are always free and open to the general public. Most writers make themselves available, following their appearance, to answer questions from the audience and sign copies of their books.

Honor Moore, Distinguished Writer in Residence
Tuesday, Sept. 6, at 7 p.m.
Brown-Alley Room, Weinstein Hall

Honor Moore has published a memoir, The Bishop’s Daughter, and a biography, The White Blackbird, A Life of the Painter Margarett Sargent by Her Granddaughter. The Bishop’s Daughter was named an Editor’s Choice by the New York Times and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2009 the Library of America published Poems from the Women’s Movement, an anthology edited by Moore, and in 2010 the Feminist Press published her translation of Taslima Nasrin’s Revenge. She is also the author of three collections of poetry—Memoir, Darling, and Red Shoes—and her play, Mourning Pictures, was produced on Broadway.  Moore has received awards in poetry and playwriting from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council for the Arts, and the Connecticut Commission for the Arts, and in 2004 was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in non-fiction.

Carolyn Forché
Thursday, Oct. 13 at 7 p.m.
Westhampton Living Room, Westhampton Center

Carolyn Forché is the author of four award-winning books of poetry, translator of three books, and editor of Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness. Her poetry has been translated into more than 20 languages. A human rights activist for more than 30 years, she was presented in 1998 with the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation Award for Peace and Culture for her work on behalf of human rights and the preservation of memory and culture. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She currently teaches at Georgetown University, where she also directs the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice.

Grace Lin
Wednesday, Oct. 19 at 7:30 p.m.
Brown-Alley Room, Weinstein Hall

The author of more than 12 books for children, Grace Lin’s works frequently incorporate Chinese folk and fairy tales into their narratives. Her most recent novel, Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, won a Newbery Honor Award, was featured on Al Roker's Kids' Book Club on Today, and appeared on the New York Times bestseller list. Her talk is titled "The Path of a Multicultural Author."

Robert Polito
Wednesday, Nov. 2 at 7 p.m.
Brown-Alley Room, Weinstein Hall

Robert Polito's most recent books are Hollywood & God, a collection of poems, and The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber, which he edited. He is also the author of the poetry collection Doubles, A Reader;s Guide to James Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover, and Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award. His reviews, criticism, and essays on literature, film, and popular music have appeared in numerous magazines and journals, including The Believer, Bookforum, Best American Essays, and Best American Film Writing. The founder and director of the Graduate Writing Program, he is a professor of writing at The New School.

Amina Gautier
Wednesday, Feb. 29 at 7 p.m.
Reception Room, Keller Hall

Amina Gautier is the winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for her short story collection At-Risk (University of Georgia Press). More than 65 of Gautier’s stories have been published, appearing in Best African American Fiction, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, North American Review, and Southern Review among other places. Her work has been honored with scholarships and fellowships from Breadloaf Writer’s Conference, Ucross Residency, and Sewanee Writer's Conference and has been awarded the William Richey Prize, the Jack Dyer Award, the Schlafly Microfiction Award, the Danahy Fiction Prize, and a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Gautier teaches at DePaul University.

Steve Almond
Wednesday, March 21 at 7 p.m.
Brown-Alley Room, Weinstein Hall

Steve Almond is the author of the 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 books Candyfreak, (Not That You Asked), and Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life. His stories have been widely anthologized, including in The Pushcart Prize and Best American Short Stories collections.  A book reviewer for numerous publications, including The Boston Globe, Almond spent seven years as a journalist in El Paso and Miami before turning his attention to literary fiction and non-fiction.

Lan Samantha Chang
Wednesday, April 11 at 7 p.m.
Brown-Alley Room, Weinstein Hall

Lan Samantha Chang is the author of the prize-winning story collection, Hunger, and the novels Inheritance and All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost.  The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, she has been a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award, among others. She has taught at Stanford and Harvard Universities and is presently director of the prestigious Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, where she is the first woman to hold that position.


2010-11 Writers Series
Creative Writing Minor
English Department Lecture Series

Ania Loomba
November 10 at 7 p.m.
Brown-Alley Room, Weinstein Hall

Ania Loomba teaches early modern literature, histories of race and colonialism, postcolonial studies, feminist theory, and contemporary Indian literature and culture at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is Catherine Bryson Professor of English. Her writings include Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama (Manchester University Press; 1989; Oxford University Press, 1992); Colonialism/Postcolonialism (Routledge, 1998); and Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism (Oxford University Press, 2002). She has co-edited Post-colonial Shakespeares (Routledge, 1998) and Postcolonial Studies and Beyond (Duke University Press, 2005). She is series editor, with David Johnson of the Open University, UK, of Postcolonial Literary Studies (Edinburgh University Press) and Race in Early Modern England: A Documentary Companion (Palgrave, 2007). Her latest publication is a critical edition of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (Norton, 2011). A co-edited collection of essays, Feminisms in South Asia: Contemporary Interventions, is forthcoming from Duke University Press. The title of her talk is “The Global Tempest.”

Maurice Lee
April 4 at 4:30 p.m.
Brown-Alley Room, Weinstein Hall

Maurice S. Lee is an associate professor of English at Boston University. His research and teaching interests include nineteenth-century American literature with particular emphasis on the intersections of culture, politics, philosophy, and science; African American literature; the literature of slavery and the Civil War; and American literary and intellectual history. He is the author of Slavery, Philosophy, and American Literature, 1830–1860 (Cambridge University Press, 2005); The Cambridge Companion to Frederick Douglass (Cambridge University Press, 2009); and Uncertain Chances: Science, Skepticism, and Belief in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2011), as well as numerous essays in leading professional journals. Currently he is at work on another book-length study titled Accounting for Literature: Aesthetics, Interpretation, and Quantification and several essays toward an intellectual history of the black press. The title of his talk is “Manning Up in the Civil War: Slavery, Risk, and Frederick Douglass.”