Lectures

Local Readings and Literary Events

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Events in the Zell Visiting Writers Series

David Mitchell Zell Distinguished Writer in Residence

Monday, October 29

Fiction Reading: 6:00 pm, The Apse, UMMA

Reception and booksigning from 5:00-6:00 pm in the Forum

Thursday, November 1

Q&A: 2:00 pm, Hopwood Room

"Building the Perfect Beast: What Animates the Novel?": 5:10 pm, Helmut Stern Auditorium, UMMA

David Mitchell is the acclaimed author of the novels Cloud Atlas, which was a Man Booker Prize finalist and which was recently made into a major motion picture starring Tom Hanks; Black Swan Green, which was selected as one of the 10 Best Books of the Year by Time; Number9Dream, which was short-listed for the Man Booker as well as the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; Ghostwritten, awarded the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for best book by a writer under thirty-five and short-listed for the Guardian First Book Award; and most recently, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. He lives in Ireland.

Toi Derricotte

Thursday, November 8

Craft Talk: 2:00 pm, Hopwood Room

Poetry Reading: 5:10 pm, Helmut Stern Auditorium, UMMA

Toi Derricotte's new book, The Undertaker's Daughter, was just released by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Her previous books areTender (1997), winner of the 1998 Paterson Poetry Prize; Captivity (1989); Natural Birth (1983); and The Empress of the Death House(1978).The Black Notebooks, her literary memoir, was published by W.W. Norton in 1997 and won the 1998 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Non-Fiction and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She has essays published in The Best American Essays 2006, edited by Lauren Slater, andThe Best American Essays 2011, edited by Edwidge Danticat. Of her poems, Sharon Olds wrote, "Toi Derricotte's poems show us our underlife, tender and dreadful. And they are vibrant poems, poems in the voice of the living creature, the one who escaped--and paused, and turned back, and saw, and cried out. This is one of the most beautiful and necessary voices in American poetry today."

Recognized as a Distinguished Daughter of Pennsylvania in 2009, her honors include the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America; two Pushcart Prizes; the Distinguished Pioneering of the Arts Award from the United Black Artists; the Alumni/Alumnae Award from New York University; the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award from Poets & Writers, Inc.; the Elizabeth Kray Award for service to the field of poetry from Poets House; and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation and the Maryland State Arts Council. In 2009, she received the University of Pittsburgh Chancellor's Distinguished Public Service Award. With Cornelius Eady, she co-founded Cave Canem Foundation. She is a Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh. Photo by Seichi Tsutsumi.

Terrance Hayes

Thursday, November 15

Craft Talk: 2:00 pm, Hopwood Room

Poetry Reading: 5:10 pm, Helmut Stern Auditorium, UMMA

Terrance Hayes is the author of four books of poetry; Lighthead (2010),winner of the 2010 National Book Award in Poetry; Wind in a Box, winner of a Pushcart Prize; Hip Logic, winner of the National Poetry Series, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and runner-up for the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Muscular Music, winner of both the Whiting Writers Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. He has been a recipient of many other honors and awards, including two Pushcart selections, four Best American Poetry selections, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the Guggenheim Foundation. His poems have appeared in literary journals and magazines including The New Yorker, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Fence, The Kenyon Review, Jubilat, Harvard Review, and Poetry. His poetry has been featured on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. A Professor of Creative Writing at Carnegie Mellon University, Hayes lives in Pittsburgh with his wife and children.

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Other Local Readings and Literary Events

Jeremiah Childers and Henry W. Leung  Webster Reading

Friday, November 2

7:00-8:00 pm, Helmut Stern Auditorium, UMMA

Jeremiah Childers received a BA from the University of Illinois, where he was an editorial assistant for Ninth Letter, and is currently a second year poetry student in

the MFA Program at the University of Michigan. He is the recipient of a 2012 Bread Loaf Scholarship.

Henry W. Leung is a Kundiman Fellow, a columnist for the Lantern Review, and an editorial intern for the Best American Nonrequired

Reading. His prose and poems have been published in Boxcar, CURA, Cerise Press, Tin House, and ZYZZYVA.

Henry W. Leung  Chapbook Release: Paradise Hunger

Saturday, November 3

7:00-8:00 pm, WORK Gallery, 306 S. State Street

"Exquisitely structured in elegiac lyric tapestries, Paradise Hunger ferries us into a luminous underworld..."  -Stephen Hong Sohn

Paradise Hunger, Henry W. Leung's first poetry chapbook, was the winner of the 2012 Swan Scythe Press Poetry Chapbook Contest.

Bruce Lack and Daniel DiStefano  Webster Reading

Friday, November 16

7:00-8:00 pm, Helmut Stern Auditorium, UMMA

Bruce Lack, born and raised in Mid-Michigan, served honorably in the United States Marine

Corps from 2003-2007. He deployed twice, spending twenty-one months in Fallujah, Iraq.

Returning to his home state in 2007, he was thrilled to find the love of his life and a talent for

relating his experiences in war to civilians. He graduated Magna Cum Laude from Western

Michigan University in 2011. He took second place in the 2010 Winning Writers War Poetry

Contest and won the Hopwood Award Theodore Roethke Prize for the Long Poem or Poetic

Sequence in 2012.

Daniel DiStefano was once a foreign contracts coordinator for a literary agency in New York City, but is now pursuing his MFA in Fiction at the University of Michigan.  He was the recent runner-up in the Missouri Review 2012 Audio Contest, and has fiction forthcoming or published in Indiana Review, Whitefish Review, and The Rambler.  He lives in Ann Arbor with Freddy, his 22-year-old pet frog.

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Difficulty viewing this email? Click here for University of Michigan MFA Program in Creative Writing Public Readings and Events; for all other events, use the link included in the listing.  Nicola's Books provides books by authors in the Zell Visiting Writers Series for purchase at their readings.  

All MFA Program events listed, including the Zell Visiting Writers Series and the Webster Reading Series, are free and open to the public.