2017-2018 Academic Year
Edwidge Danticat Reading and Conversation Recorded on October 26, 2017
Edwidge Danticat has received numerous awards and honors, including the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography, the American Book Award, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, and was twice a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction. She will be on campus to celebrate her new Sister Mariella Gable Award-winning book, The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story.
The Art of Death grew from her experience mourning the death of her mother, and it is an exceptional blend of critical and personal writing. If writers are told to “write what you know,” death is the one thing that is ultimately unknowable: we witness the moment right before, or right after, but the reality remains elusive, and writers unavoidably focus on life. In this astute and intimate work of criticism, Danticat assesses how writers as different as Toni Morrison, Taye Selasi, and C.S. Lewis have approached death, grief, and loss, and it culminates with her channeling the voice of her mother. It’s impossible to emerge unmoved from this profound and incisive book.
Solmaz Sharif Reading and Conversation November 15-16 2017
Solmaz Sharif's Look is a powerful, innovative exploration of the language of war by a new poet of passion and conscience. It was a finalist for the 2016 National Book Award for Poetry, named one of the New York Times Book Review's 100 notable Books of 2016, a A Publisher's Weekly Best Book of 2016, a Washington Post Best Poetry Collection of 2016, one of The New Yorker's "Books We Loved" in 2016, and one of the San Franciso Chronicle's 100 Recommended Books of 2016.
Kevin Young Reading and Conversation March 21, 2018
Kevin Young is the most recently the author of Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News (Graywolf Press 2018). He is also author of a previous book of nonfiction, The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness, which won the PEN Open Book Award, was recognized as a New York Times Notable Book, and named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. He is the author of eleven books of poetry, including Brown and Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995–2015. Young is the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and poetry editor for the New Yorker.
John Coy and Gaylord Schanilec Reading and Conversaton April 19, 2018
John Coy is the author of young adult novels, the 4 for 4 middle-grade series, and fiction and nonfiction picture books. He has received numerous awards for his work including a Marion Vannett Ridgway Award for best debut picture book, a Charlotte Zolotow Honor, Bank Street College Best Book of the Year, Notable Book for a Global Society, the Burr/Warzalla Award for Distinguished Achievement in Children’s Literature and the the Kerlan Award in recognition of singular attainments in the creation of children’s literature. John lives in Minneapolis and visits schools around the world.
Gaylord Schanilec is an American wood engraver, printer, designer and illustrator. He is the proprietor of the press Midnight Paper Sales, located in Stockholm, Wisconsin.