WORCESTER, Mass. – As part of the College of the Holy Cross Visiting Writers Lecture Series, the following writers will give readings during the 2005 spring semester. All readings are free and open to the public. This series is sponsored by the College’s Creative Writing Program.
February 3
Tom Sleigh
7:30 p.m., Cantor Art Gallery, O’Kane Hall
Tom Sleigh is the author of five books of poetry: After One (1983), which won the Houghton Mifflin New Poetry Prize; The Waking (l990), a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; The Chain (l996); The Dreamhouse (1999), which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and, most recently, Far Side of the Earth (2004). His honors include an Individual Writers’ Award from the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund, the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, and grants from the National Endowment of the Arts, the Guggenheim and Ingram Merrill Foundations and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He teaches at Dartmouth College.
February 15
Lan Samantha Chang
7:30 p.m., Levis Browsing Room, Dinand Library
Lan Samantha Chang is the author of the critically acclaimed collection of short stories, Hunger: A Novella and Stories (1998) and the recently published Inheritance: A Novel (2004). Chang’s fiction has been published in The Atlantic Monthly and her work has twice been included in the Best American Short Stories Collection. She was a Bunting Fellow at Radcliffe, a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and she has received additional fellowships from Princeton University, Harvard University and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Chang has received a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts, and has been honored as the California Book Award Silver Medalist, as a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award and with a Bay Area Book Award. She is currently working as a Brigg-Copeland Lecturer in Fiction at Harvard University.
March 1
Carolyne Wright
7:30 p.m., Levis Browsing Room, Dinand Library
Carolyne Wright’s latest book of poetry is Seasons of Mangoes and Brainfire (2000) which won the Blue Lynx Prize, the Oklahoma Book Award in Poetry, and an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Other collections include Premonitions of an Uneasy Guest (AWP Award Series) (1983), Stealing the Children (1978), and an invitational chapbook, Carolyne Wright: Greatest Hits 1975-2001 (2002). She has also published a collection of essays, A Choice of Fidelities: Lectures and Readings from a Writer’s Life (1994) and volumes of poetry translated from Spanish and Bengali. Forthcoming in 2005 are A Change of Maps, poems, and Majestic Nights: Love Poems by Bengali Women.
April 12
Chris Forhan
7:30 p.m., Levis Browsing Room, Dinand Library
Chris Forhan has published two award winning books of poetry: Forgive Us Our Happiness (1999) won the Bakeless Prize judged by Ellen Bryant Voigt (1999) and The Actual Moon, The Actual Stars (2003) won the Samuel French Morse Prize (2003). He has also published two chapbooks, X: A poem (2000) and Crumbs of Bread (1995). His poetry has won a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, New England Review, Parnassus and many other magazines. He teaches at Auburn University, Ala. and in the Warren Wilson M.F.A. Program, N.C.
April 19
Alicia Erian
7:30 p.m., Levis Browsing Room, Dinand Library
Alicia Erian is the author of a short story collection called The Brutal Language of Love (2001), and a new novel, Towelhead (2005). Her work has appeared in Playboy, Zoetrope, Nerve, The Iowa Review and other publications. She teaches at Wellesley College.
April 21
Susan Brind Morrow
7:30 p.m., Levis Browsing Room, Dinand Library
Susan Brind Morrow has translated contemporary Arabic poetry and ancient Egyptian folktales into English. She has worked on an archaeological survey in the Western Desert of Egypt, and was a fellow of the Crane-Rogers Foundation in Egypt and Sudan. Her first book, the critically acclaimed, The Names of Things: Life, Language, and Beginnings in the Egyptian Desert (1997) was one of three finalists for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award. She has recently completed a second book — Wolves and Honey: A Hidden History of the Natural World (2004) — about the Finger Lakes Region where she lives on a farm.
April 28
Bill Roorbach
7:30 p.m., Rehm Library, Smith Hall
Bill Roorbach is the author of Big Bend (2002), short stories, and The Smallest Color (2002), a novel. Roorbach’s nonfiction works include A Place on Water, with Robert Kimber and Wesley McNair (2004), Into Woods (2002), Summers with Juliet (1992), and The Art of Truth (2001), an anthology of literary memoirs, personal essays and literary journalism which he edited. His next book of nonfiction, Temple Stream, will appear in July 2005. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, Harper’s, Granta and others. He is a professor in the English department and the Jenks Chair in Contemporary American Letters at Holy Cross.
