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.
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Benjamin Nugent
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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.
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Sam Lipsyte
Sam Lipsyte is the author of five novels and two short-story collections, including The Ask, Hark and No One Left to Come Looking for You. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Paris Review, n+1, Noon, Open City, The Quarterly and Best American Short Stories, among other places. A Guggenheim Fellow and winner of the Believer Book Award, he lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. -
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/.
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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.
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Ken Womack
Kenneth Womack is one of the world’s leading authorities on the Beatles and their enduring cultural influence. He is the author of a two-volume biography devoted to famed Beatles producer Sir George Martin, including Maximum Volume (2017) and Sound Pictures (2018). His latest book, John Lennon 1980: The Last Days in the Life (2020), traces the story of the former Beatle’s comeback after five years of self-imposed retirement. Dr. Womack will be reading from his upcoming biography of Beatles roadie, Mal Evans.
This event is free and open to the public. RSVP to mmcbride@monmouth.edu
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Ricky Tucker
Please join us for a reading by Ricky Tucker. Tucker is a storyteller, an educator, a lead creative, and an art critic based in NYC. His work explores the imprints of art and memory on narrative, and the absurdity of most fleeting moments. He has written for the Paris Review, the Tenth Magazine, and Public Seminar, among others, and has performed for reading series including the Moth Grand SLAM, Sister Spit, Born: Free, and Spark London. In 2017, he was chosen as a Lambda Literary Emerging Writer Fellow for creative nonfiction.
Please RSVP for the event to: mmcbride@monmouth.edu
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Rivka Galchen
Rivka Galchen is the recipient of a William Saroyan International Prize for Writing and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, among other honors. She writes regularly for The New Yorker, whose editors selected her for their list of “20 Under 40” American fiction writers in 2010. Her debut novel, Atmospheric Disturbances (2008), and her story collection, American Innovations (2014), were both New York Times Best Books of the Year. She received an MD from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Galchen divides her time between Montreal and New York City. Her latest novel, Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch, was released by FSG in June.
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Jane Wong
Join us for a zoom reading and Q&A with author Jane Wong.
Jane Wong is the author of How to Not Be Afraid of Everything (Alice James, 2021) and Overpour (Action Books, 2016). Her poems and essays can be found in places such as Best American Nonrequired Reading 2019, Best American Poetry 2015, American Poetry Review, POETRY, AGNI, Virginia Quarterly Review, McSweeney’s, and Ecotone. A Kundiman fellow, she is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships and residencies from Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room, the U.S. Fulbright Program, Artist Trust, the Fine Arts Work Center, Hedgebrook, and others. She is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Western Washington University.
When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation.
Free and open to the public, but registration is required.
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Anna Qu
Join us for a zoom reading and Q&A with author Anna Qu.
Anna is the author of the memoir Made in China (Catapult 2021). Her work has appeared in Poets & Writers, Lithub, Threepenny Review, Lumina, Kartika, Kweli, Vol.1, Brooklyn, and Jezebel, among others. Anna serves as the Nonfiction Editor at Kweli Journal.
Anna is also teaching the Nonfiction Workshop this semester at Monmouth University.
When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation.
Free and open to the public, but registration is required.