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  • Ross Gay – Toni Morrison Day Keynote Speaker

    Ross Gay is the author of the poetry collections Against Which (2006), Bringing the Shovel Down (2011), Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (2015), winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and Be Holding (2022), winner of the PEN American Literary Jean Stein Award. As an essayist, he has published The Book of Delights, a 2019 New York Times bestseller, Inciting Joy (2022), and The Book of (More) Delights (2023). Gay is founding co-editor of the online sports magazine Some Call it Ballin’ and an ardent gardener and founding board member of the Bloomington Community Orchard, a non-profit, free-fruit-for-all food justice and joy project.

    Visit the Toni Morrison homepage for the complete program: https://www.monmouth.edu/department-of-english/toni-morrison-day/

    Co-Sponsored by the Department of English, Intercultural Center , Wayne D. McMurray School of Humanities and Social Sciences, School of Social Work, Leon Hess Business School, History & Anthropology, Guggenheim Memorial Library, Monmouth Review

    Special thanks to community partner Project Write Now

    Questions can go to english@monmouth.edu

  • Hernan Diaz

    Hernan Diaz is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of two novels translated into thirty-four languages. He is the recipient of the John Updike award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, given to “a writer whose contributions to American literature have demonstrated consistent excellence.”

    His first novel, In the Distance, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and it was the winner of the Saroyan International Prize, the Cabell Award, the Prix Page America, and the New American Voices Award, among other distinctions. It was also a Publishers Weekly Top 10 Book of the Year and one of Lit Hub’s 20 Best Novels of the Decade.

    Trust, his second novel, received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was a New York Times bestseller, the winner of the Kirkus Prize, and longlisted for the Booker Prize, among other nominations. It was listed as a best book of the year by over thirty publications and named one of the 10 Best Books of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, and Time magazine, and it was one of The New Yorker’s 12 Essential Reads of the Year. One of Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of 2022, Trust is currently being developed as a limited series for HBO.

    Hernan Diaz’s stories and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, Harper’s, The Atlantic, Granta, The Yale Review, Playboy, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. He has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and The Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center.

    Diaz holds a PhD from NYU, edits an academic journal at Columbia University, and is also the author of Borges, between History and Eternity.

  • Mihaela Moscaliuc and Michael Waters

    Mihaela Moscaliuc is the author of the poetry collections Cemetery Ink (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021),  Immigrant Model (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015) and Father Dirt (Alice James Books, 2010), translator of Liliana Ursu’s Clay and Star (Etruscan Press, 2019) and Carmelia Leonte’s The Hiss of the Viper (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2015), editor of Insane Devotion: On the Writing of Gerald Stern (Trinity University Press, 2016), and co-editor (with Michael Waters) of Border Lines: Poems of Migration (Knopf, 2020). She has published scholarship in the field of Romani Studies, on issues of representation, appropriation, exophony and code-switching, and on the works of Kimiko Hahn, Agha Shahid Ali, and Colum McCann. She is the Translation Editor for Plume.

    Moscaliuc has received two Glenna Luschei Awards from Prairie Schooner, residency fellowships from The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, MacDowell, and Le Chateau de Lavigny (Switzerland), Dairy Hollow, two Individual Artist Fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and a Fulbright fellowship to Romania.

    She is graduate program director and associate professor of English at Monmouth University (New Jersey) and former poetry & translation faculty in the low-residency M.F.A. program at Drew University (New Jersey).

    Michael Waters’ recent books include Sinnerman (Etruscan Press, 2023), Caw (BOA Editions, 2020), & The Dean of Discipline (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018). Darling Vulgarity (BOA Editions, 2006) was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His co-edited anthologies include Border Lines: Poems of Migration (Knopf, 2020) & Reel Verse: Poems About the Movies (Knopf, 2019). His poems have appeared in numerous journals, includingPoetry, American Poetry Review, Paris Review, Yale Review, & Kenyon Review. A 2017 Guggenheim Fellow, recipient of five Pushcart Prizes & fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Fulbright Foundation, & NJ State Council on the Arts, Waters lives without a cell phone in Ocean, NJ.

  • Kaitlyn Greenidge

    Kaitlyn Greenidge’s debut novel is We Love You, Charlie Freeman (Algonquin Books), one of the New York Times Critics’ Top 10 Books of 2016. Her writing has appeared in the Vogue, Glamour, the Wall Street Journal, Elle, Buzzfeed, Transition Magazine, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Believer, American Short Fiction and other places. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University and the Guggenheim Foundation. She is currently Features Director at Harper’s Bazaar as well as a contributing writer for The New York Times. Her second novel, Libertie, is published by Algonquin Books and out now.

  • Benjamin Nugent

    Benjamin Nugent is the author of Fraternity: Stories (FSG, 2020). He was awarded The Paris Review’s 2019 Terry Southern Prize for his fiction, which has been published in The Best American Short Stories and other anthologies. He’s written for Harper’s, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Times Magazine, and other publications. He grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts, and is currently Director of the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA at Southern New Hampshire University.

  • Dinty W. Moore

    Dinty W. Moore is a celebrated American essayist and a pioneering, early practitioner of creative nonfiction. He received the Grub Street National Book Prize for Non-Fiction for his memoir, Between Panic and Desire, in 2008 and, more recently, is also the author of the memoir To Hell With It: Of Sin and Sex, Chicken Wings, and Dante’s Entirely Ridiculous, Needlessly Guilt-Inducing Inferno, the writing guides The Story Cure, Crafting the Personal Essay, and The Mindful Writer, and many other books and edited anthologies.

  • Katherine Dykstra

    The author will read from her book What Happened to Paula followed by a Q&A.

    Katherine Dykstra holds an MFA in creative writing from the New School. She served as senior nonfiction editor at Guernica for many years and taught narrative nonfiction in NYU’s continuing studies program. Her essays have been published in The Washington Post, Crab Orchard Review, The Common, Shenandoah, Gulf Coast, Brain, Child, Poets and Writers, Real Simple and the Random House anthology 20 Something Essays by 20 Something Writers, among other places. Her work has been included in the “Notables” section of both the 2015 and 2016 Best American Essays collections edited by Ariel Levy and Jonathan Franzen, respectively. She was one of three finalists for the 2014 John Guyon Literary Nonfiction Prize. She won first place in the 2012 Waterman Fund Essay Contest and placed third in the 2013 Real Simple Life Lessons Essay Contest.

    She was recently named an “artist to watch” by Creative Capital for her work on the Paula Oberbroeckling story, which is the topic of her debut nonfiction book What Happened to Paula: On the Death of An American Girl, published by W.W. Norton.  What Happened to Paula received a starred and boxed Publishers Weekly review and was designated a New York Times Summer Read, a People magazine Best New Book, one of Crimereads’ Top Ten Books of 2021, a Boston Globe Book of Summer, an Observer Best Book of Summer, and a Crimereads Best Book of Summer. You can find out more about Katie at her website: http://www.katherinedykstra.com/.

  • Woody Guthrie: Songs and Art, Words and Wisdom – Conversation and Book Signing with Nora Guthrie and Bob Santelli

    Hosted by the Bruce Springsteen Archives & Center for American Music at Monmouth University

  • Throws and Prose

    Throws and Prose

    Can you SPARE a night to write with us? The English M.A./M.F.A. Program will be holding a fun, exciting event on campus on November 11 from 5-7 p.m.

    What’s more fun than bowling AND writing? This event is right up your alley. Join us as a bowler or a spectator…we’ll spend time in the alley and then move to the gym for some writing, refreshments, and an open mic. There is a limited amount of bowlers allowed, so please, RSVP to attend. Shoes and ball are included in your registration. RSVP to mmcbride@monmouth.edu.

  • A Conversation with Robert Pinsky

    Join former three-term US Poet Laureate and Long Branch, NJ native Robert Pinsky for an evening of conversation in celebration of the release of his memoir Jersey Breaks.  The evening will be moderated by the Dean of The Wayne D. McMurray School of Humanities and Social Sciences, David Hamilton Golland, Ph.D.

    “Truly the voice of the Jersey Shore.” – Bruce Springsteen

    The acclaimed poet takes an affectionate look back. The U.S. poet laureate from 1997 to 2000 and “an expert at nothing except the sounds of sentences in the English language,” Pinsky (b. 1940) moves back and forth in time, narrating his life in crisp, self-deprecating prose. “If I have a story to tell,” he writes, “it’s how the failures and aspirations of a certain time and place led to poetry.” That place was Long Branch, New Jersey, where the author grew up in an Orthodox, lower-middle-class family in a neighborhood that was both poor and segregated. In the “sounds of Hebrew,” Pinsky heard Milton, Blake, and Whitman. He recalls reading stories and poems in the glossy magazines in his optician father’s waiting room as well as the “exact moment when I became a writer,” thanks to Through the Looking Glass. As an “ambitious, pseudointellectual freshman” at Rutgers University, he encountered and enjoyed Ulysses and the poetry of William Carlos Williams, T.S. Eliot, and Allen Ginsberg. Pinsky confesses that his way of writing a poem stems from getting a “tune in my head…like noodling at the piano,” and his approach fostered his popular Favorite Poem Project, which combined the “appeal of gossip with the appeal of art.”

    Though the author loved playing music, poetry came first in college, and he explains how his “habit of thinking about names was essential to my work as a poet.” He lavishes praise on two cantankerous college teachers—Paul Fussell and “relentless dictator” Yvor Winters—as well as his friend and mentor Thom Gunn. When teaching at Wellesley in 1970, Pinsky attended Robert Lowell’s “erratic writing workshop,” and Lowell gave him a blurb for his first collection, Sadness and Happiness. Throughout, the author sharply dissects a variety of poems, including his own, and he excitedly explains the welcome challenge of translating Dante’s Inferno.

    Fans of literature will relish Pinsky’s jocular recollections and infectious love of poetry.