Carr Authors Series to Feature Honored Writers Across Genres
February 8, 2006
Champaign - Five prize-winning writers of fiction, nonfiction and poetry will read from their works this semester at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
The writers are taking part in the Carr Visiting Authors Reading Series, an event of the English department’s MFA Creative Writing Program.
All of the readings are free and open to the public and will begin at 4:30 p.m., except as noted below, in the Authors Corner of the Illini Union Bookstore, 809 S. Wright St., Champaign.
- Feb. 22, Ruth Ellen Kocher, a poet who teaches literature and writing at the University of Missouri at St. Louis. Kocher is the author of “One Girl Babylon, When the Moon Knows You’re Wandering,” winner of the Green Rose Prize in Poetry.
- April 3, Chris Abani, a novelist, poet and the author of “GraceLand” and “Master of the Board,” among other novels. His poetry collections are “Hands Washing Water,” “Dog Woman,” “Daphne’s Lot” and “Kalakuta Republic.” Abani teaches at the University of California at Riverside and in the MFA Program at Antioch University in Los Angeles. He is the recipient of the PEN USA Freedom-to-Write Award, the Prince Claus Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a California Book Award, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the PEN Hemingway Book Prize in 2005.
- April 5, William Wenthe, who teaches creative writing and 20th-century poetry at Texas Tech University. Two of his poems have won Pushcart prizes, and his collection of poetry titled “Not Till We Are Lost” was nominated for 10 awards, including a Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, William Carlos Williams Award and Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.
- April 11, (5 p.m.), Susan B. Anthony Somers-Willett, a poet and Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Illinois, where she teaches poetry and poetics. Somers-Willett’s first book of poetry, “Roam,” won inclusion in the Crab Orchard Award Series this year. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals including the Virginia Quarterly Review, RATTLE, Painted Bride Quarterly and Hayden’s Ferry Review.
The MFA program began at Illinois in fall 2002.
Visit http://www.news.uiuc.edu/news/06/0208carr.html to read more.
source: http://www.news.uiuc.edu/
Andrea Lynn, Humanities Editor