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  • VIRTUAL Tuesday Night Book Club: Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn

    Join us for Tuesday Night Book Club! Hosted by Monmouth University’s Ken Womack and Michael Thomas, each month we’ll explore a different novel. All you have to do is Zoom in and join the discussion!

    Our first selection is Colm Toibin’s celebrated Brooklyn (2009). In the novel, Eilis Lacey comes of age in small-town Ireland in the hard years following World War Two. When an Irish priest from Brooklyn offers to sponsor Eilis in America, she decides she must go, leaving her fragile mother and her charismatic sister behind. Eilis finds work in a department store on Fulton Street, and when she least expects it, finds love. Tony, who loves the Dodgers and his big Italian family, slowly wins her over with patient charm. But just as Eilis begins to fall in love, devastating news from Ireland threatens the promise of her future.

    When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation. CLICK HERE for more information on how to use zoom

  • Taije Silverman

    Taije Silverman is the author of Houses Are Fields, a book of poems published in 2009 by Louisiana University Press. Her Selected Poems of Giovanni Pascoli (translated from the Italian with Marina Della Putta Johnston) will be published by Princeton University Press in fall 2019. Recent poems and translations have been in The Best American Poetry 2017 and  The Best American Poetry 2016, Harvard Review, The Nation, Agni, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Her poems are forthcoming in The Gettysburg Review, Five Points, and The Georgia Review. She is the recipient of a 2017 Pushcart Prize, the 2016 Anne Halley Prize for best poem in The Massachusetts Review, a 2011 Fulbright Award, the 2010-11 W.K. Rose Fellowship from Vassar College, and residencies from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Houses Are Fields appeared in Italian translation in 2013 (Le Case Sono Campi, trans. Giorgia Pordenoni, Oedipus Edizioni). Silverman previously taught at the University of Bologna, where she was a Fulbright Scholar, and at Emory University, where she was the Creative Writing Fellow.

  • Alexandra Kleeman

    Alexandra Kleeman is a Staten Island-based writer of fiction and nonfiction, and the winner of the 2016 Bard Fiction Prize. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Zoetrope: All-Story, Conjunctions, and Guernica, among others. Nonfiction essays and reportage have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Tin House, n+1, and The Guardian. Her work has received scholarships and grants from Bread Loaf, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Santa Fe Art Institute, and ArtFarm Nebraska. She is the author of the debut novel You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine (Harper, 2015) and Intimations (Harper, 2016), a short story collection

  • POSTPONED – Jordy Rosenberg

    Photo by Beowulf Sheehan.

    Jordy Rosenberg is the author of Confessions of the Fox – described by The New York Times as “a mind-bending romp through a gender-fluid, 18th-century London,” named a New York Times Editor’s Choice selection, finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, a Lambda Literary Award, and a Publishing Triangle Award. Confessions has been recognized by The New Yorker, the Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, Kirkus Reviews, LitHub, Electric Literature and the Feminist Press as one of the Best Books of 2018.

    Jordy is a professor of 18th-Century Literature, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Critical Theory at The University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

  • Katie Ford

    Location: Wilson Hall

    Katie Ford is the author of Deposition, Colosseum, and the forthcoming Blood Lyrics (Graywolf Press, 2014). Ford is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship and the Larry Levis Prize. Colosseum was named among the “Best Books of 2008” by Publishers Weekly and the Virginia Quarterly Review. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Paris Review, The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and many other journals. She teaches at Franklin & Marshall College and lives in Philadelphia with her husband, the novelist Josh Emmons, and their young daughter.

  • Jan Beatty

    Location:Wilson Auditorium

    Jan Beatty’s fourth full-length book, The Switching/Yard, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in February, 2013. A limited edition chapbook, Ravage, was published by Lefty Blondie Press in 2012. Other books include Red Sugar, finalist for the 2009 Paterson Poetry Prize; Boneshaker, finalist, Milton Kessler Award; Mad River, Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize—all published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Her chapbook, Ravenous, won the 1995 State Street Prize.

    Other awards include the $15,000 Creative Achievement Award in Literature from the Heinz Foundation, the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, Discovery/The Nation Prize finalist, and two fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Individual poems have appeared in journals such as TriQuarterly, Gulf Coast, Court Green, and Best American Poetry 2013. Her poetry has appeared in anthologies published by Autumn House Press, Coffee House Press, Houghton Mifflin, Oxford University Press, University of Illinois Press, Kent State University Press, and the University of Iowa Press. Beatty’s work has earned writing fellowships at the Santa Fe Arts Institute; the MacDowell Colony; Ragdale; the Montana Artist Refuge; Jentel, Wyoming; Ucross, Wyoming; Hedgebrook, Washington; Whooping Crane Trust, James L. Grahl Research Center; and Leighton Studios at Banff, Alberta, Canada. Her essays on writing have appeared in anthologies by Autumn House Press, Creative Nonfiction, and The State University of New York Press. She has read her work widely, at venues such as the Los Angeles Times Book Festival, the Geraldine R. Dodge Festival, Split This Rock Poetry Festival, Sarah Lawrence College, and the KGB Bar in New York City.

    Beatty worked as a waitress for fifteen years, and as a welfare caseworker, an abortion counselor, and a social worker and teacher in maximum-security prisons. She is the managing editor of MadBooks, a small press that has published a series of books and chapbooks by women writers. For the past twenty years, Beatty has hosted and produced Prosody, a public radio show on NPR affiliate WESA-FM featuring the work of national writers. She has lectured in writing workshops across the country, and has taught at the university level for over twenty years at the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University, and Carlow. Beatty directs the creative writing program at Carlow University, where she runs the Madwomen in the Attic writing workshops and teaches in the MFA program.

  • Anna Journey

    Anna Journey is the author of the poetry collections Vulgar Remedies (Louisiana State University Press, 2013) and If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting (University of Georgia Press, 2009), which was selected by Thomas Lux for the National Poetry Series. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry, FIELD, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. Her creative nonfiction appears or is forthcoming in At Length, Better, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. She’s received fellowships in poetry from Yaddo and the National Endowment for the Arts, and she teaches creative writing in Pacific University’s Master of Fine Arts in Writing program.

    Location: Wilson Auditorium

  • Poet Richard Blanco

    Location: Pollak Theatre

    President Obama’s Inaugural Poet, Richard Blanco was made in Cuba, assembled in Spain, and imported to the United States—meaning his mother, 7 months pregnant, and the rest of the family arrived as exiles from Cuba to Madrid where he was born. Only 45 days later, the family emigrated once more and settled in Miami. His acclaimed first book of poetry, City of a Hundred Fires, explores the yearnings and negotiation of cultural identity as a Cuban- American, and received the Agnes Starrett Poetry Prize. His second book, Directions to The Beach of the Dead, won the Beyond Margins Award from the PEN American Center for its continued exploration of the universal themes of cultural identity and homecoming.

  • Visiting Writers: Louise Gluck

    Louise Glück is one of America’s finest contemporary poets. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Glück is a former Poet Laureate of the United States and the author of a dozen widely acclaimed books. Stephen Dobyns, writing in the New York Times Book Review, said “no American poet writes better than Louise Glück, perhaps none can lead us so deeply into our own nature.” Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Hass has called her “one of the purest and most accomplished lyric poets now writing.”

  • Willis, Aliki and Tony Barnstone

    Location: Wilson Auditorium

    Willis Barnstone was born in Lewiston, Maine, and educated at Bowdoin, Columbia, and Yale. He taught in Greece at the end of the civil war (1949-51), in Buenos Aires during the Dirty War, and during the Cultural Revolution went to China, where he was later a Fulbright Professor of American Literature at Beijing Foreign Studies University (1984-1985). His publications include Modern European Poetry (Bantam, 1967), The Other Bible (HarperCollins, 1984) The Secret Reader: 501 Sonnets (New England, 1996), a memoir biography With Borges on an Ordinary Evening in Buenos Aires (Illinois, 1993), and To Touch the Sky (New Directions, 1999). His literary translation of the New Testament The New Covenant: The Four Gospels and Apocalypse was published by Riverhead Books in 2002. Most recently, he has published two more collections of translations: The Complete Poems of Sappho and The Restored New Testament: A New Translation with Commentary, Including the Gnostic Gospels Thomas, Mary, and Judas. A Guggenheim Fellow and Pulitzer Prize finalist in poetry, Barnstone is Distinguished Professor at Indiana University. 

    Aliki Barnstone is a poet, translator, critic, and editor. Her books of poems are Blue Earth (Iris, 2004), Wild With It (Sheep Meadow, 2002), a National Books Critics Circle Notable Book, Madly in Love (Carnegie-Mellon, 1997), Windows in Providence (Curbstone, 1981), and The Real Tin Flower (which was introduced by Anne Sexton and was published by Macmillan in 1968, when she was twelve years old). Her translation, The Collected Poems of C.P. Cavafy came out with W.W. Norton in 2006. In 2007, Changing Rapture: Emily Dickinson’s Poetic Development appeared with University Press of New England. She has two books of poems forthcoming: Dr. God, Dear Dr. Heartbreak: New and Selected Poems (the Sheep Meadow Press) and Bright Body (White Pine Press). Barnstone spent the fall of 2006 in Greece as a Senior Fulbright Scholar. Her project was to write a sequence of poems in the voice of an imaginary poet, Eva Victoria Perera, a Sephardic Jew from Thessaloniki, who survives the Holocaust. She is Professor of English in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Missouri, Columbia. 

    Tony Barnstone is The Albert Upton Professor of English Language and Literature at Whittier College and holds a Masters in English and Creative Writing and Ph.D. in English Literature from U.C. Berkeley. He has won fellowships and poetry awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, the Pushcart Prize, the Paumanok Poetry Award, the Randall Jarrell Poetry Prize, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Contest, the Milton Dorfman Poetry Prize, the National Poetry Competition (Chester H. Jones Foundation), the Pablo Neruda Prize in Poetry, the Cecil Hemley Award, and the Poetry Society of America. In 2006 he won the Benjamin Saltman Award in Poetry for his manuscript The Golem of Los Angeles, which was published by Red Hen Press in 2007. He won the John Ciardi Prize in Poetry in 2008 for Tongue of War and won the grand prize in the Strokestown International Poetry Festival, in Strokestown, Ireland, in 2008. 

    His first book of poetry, Impure, a finalist for the Walt Whitman Prize of the Academy of American Poets, the National Poetry Series Prize, and other national literary competitions, appeared with the University Press of Florida in June of 1999. He is also the author of a chapbook of poems, Naked Magic. His second book of poems, Sad Jazz: Sonnets appeared in 2005 with Sheep Meadow Press. His most recent book of poems, The Golem of Los Angeles, won the Benjamin Saltman Award in Poetry and was published in late 2007 by Red Hen Press. His new project is Pulp Sonnets, a collection of poems based upon classic pulp fiction, comic books, and horror, film noir and sci-fi movies.