Writers Series Launches Today

RFH 2010, Arts

Wed, Sep 08, 2010

Ten writers, including a Nobel Prize winner and a Pulitzer Prize winner, are part of the Living Writers course at Colgate this year .In addition to intimate classroom discussions with students, the authors will hold public readings that will be webcast live, providing alumni, parents, and others the opportunity to engage with each other and with the writers themselves.

Julia Alvarez, author of How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents and In the Time of the Butterflies, starts this year's series at 4:30 p.m. today in Love Auditorium.

Julia Alvarez won the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Literature in 2009, and was named Woman of the Year by Latina magazine.

In addition to Alvarez, the authors coming to campus detween now and the end of the year are

V.S. Naipaul (Nobel Prize for Literature, in photo),
Jhumpa Lahiri (Pulitzer Prize),
Rattawut Lapcharoensap,
Mohsin Hamid,
Frances Hwang,
Mark Ravenhill,
Dinaw Mengestu,
Tessa Hadley,
and Colgate's Peter Balakian.

(At Colgate Sept. 16) Jhumpa Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for her literary debut, a collection of short stories titled Interpreter of Maladies. Her first novel, The Namesake, was published to great acclaim three years later. Ms. Lahiri’s most recent collection, Unaccustomed Earth, received the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Born in London, Ms. Lahiri moved to Rhode Island as a child with her Bengali parents. She was educated at Boston University and now lives in Brooklyn with her family. She serves on President Obama’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities.

(At Colgate on Sept. 30) Rattawut Lapcharoensap was born in Chicago and raised in Bangkok, Thailand. He is the author of Sightseeing, a collection of short stories, which won the Asian American Literary Award, was chosen for the National Book Foundation's inaugural "5 Under 35" program, and was a finalist for the Guardian First Book Award. His work has appeared in Granta, Zoetrope, and One Story, among others. In 2007, Granta magazine named him on its list of Best Young American Novelists. He is currently an Eminent Visiting Writer at the University of Wyoming.

(At Colgate on Oct. 7) Born in Lahore in 1971, Mohsin Hamid grew up in Pakistan. He attended Princeton University then Harvard Law School, working afterward in New York and London for the prestigious firms of McKinsey & Company then Wolff Olins. His first novel, Moth Smoke, appeared in 2000 and became a cult hit in Pakistan. His second novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) recounts a Pakistani man’s abandonment of his high-flying life in New York. It became an international bestseller, winning many awards and appearing on the short list for the Man Booker Prize. Mr. Hamid now divides his time between London and Pakistan.

(At Colgate on Oct. 15) Winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize for Literature, V. S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad and educated in England. After four years at University College, Oxford, he began to write, and since then has followed no other profession. V. S. Naipaul has published more than twenty books of fiction and nonfiction, including A House for Mr. Biswas, In a Free State (winner of the 1971 Booker Prize), A Bend in the River, An Area of Darkness, Among the Believers, and Magic Seeds. His newest book, The Masque of Africa, is due out in October. Sir Vidia Naipaul lives in England with his wife, Nadira Naipaul.

(At Colgate on Oct. 21) Peter Balakian is the author of many books including a new book of poems, Ziggurat, as well as June-tree: New and Selected Poems, 1974-2000. His memoir, Black Dog of Fate won the PEN/Martha Albrand Prize for the Art of the Memoir and was a best book of the year for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Publisher’s Weekly, and was recently issued in a 10th anniversary edition. Balakian’s The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response won the 2005 Raphael Lemkin Prize and was a New York Times Notable Book and bestseller. He is Donald M. and Constance H. Rebar Professor of the Humanities in the department of English at Colgate.

(At Colgate on Oct. 28) Frances Hwang teaches at Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana. Her short story collection, Transparency, won the American Academy of Arts and Letters’s Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and a PEN/Beyond Margins Award. She has received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the MacDowell Colony, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and Colgate University. Her work has been read as part of the Selected Shorts series at Symphony Space and has appeared or is forthcoming in The New Yorker, Best New American Voices, Glimmer Train, Tin House, AGNI Online, and Subtropics.

(At Colgate on Nov. 11) Mark Ravenhill is a British playwright, actor and journalist best known for the plays Shopping & F***ing, Some Explicit Polaroids, and Mother Clapp’s Molly House. In 2008, the Royal Court, the Gate Theatre, the National Theatre, Out of Joint, and Paines Plough collectively staged the 17 plays in his Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat. He made his acting debut at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2005, performing his own monologue, Product. Educated at Bristol University, Mr. Ravenhill is a frequent contributor to the arts section of the Guardian.

(At Colgate on Nov. 18) Tessa Hadley is the author of three highly praised novels, Accidents in the Home, which was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, Everything Will Be All Right, and The Master Bedroom, as well as a collection of stories, Sunstroke. She lives in Cardiff and teaches literature and creative writing at Bath Spa University. Her stories appear regularly in The New Yorker, Granta and other magazines.

(At Colgate on Dec. 2) Dinaw Mengestu’s debut novel, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, earned him comparisons to Bellow, Fitzgerald, and Naipaul, and garnered praise for its haunting depiction of the immigrant experience in America. How to Read the Air will be released this fall. Mengestu was given a coveted spot on the New Yorker “20 under 40” Writers to Watch list and selected as a winner of the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” Award, among others. Born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Mr. Mengestu immigrated to the United Stated as a child and was educated at Georgetown and Columbia universities.

The webcasts on Colgate's Livestream channel feature an interactive chat, which allows guests to discuss the author's work and to pose questions that moderators will try to integrate into the Q&As. And, just like last year's Living Writers course, all the public readings will be videotaped and archived.

See the complete schedule of when writers will be on campus,

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