The College of Charleston’s 2011 Visiting Writers Series is bringing nationally recognized authors to campus, including 2010 National Book Award winner Jaimy Gordon and Guggenheim Fellow Carolyn Forché.
Gordon will speak on Friday, February 25, at 6:00 p.m. in Alumni Memorial Hall in Randolph Hall. Gordon will also host a question and answer session from 2:00 to 3:00 p.m. in Maybank Hall, room 107. Poet Carolyn Forché will read on campus on Thursday, April 21, at 7:00 p.m. in Alumni Memorial Hall. These events are free and open to the public.
Jaimy Gordon is the winner of 2010 National Book Award for Fiction for her novel, Lord of Misrule, and author of three previous novels, Shamp of the City-Solo, She Drove Without Stopping, and Bogeywoman, which was on the Los Angeles Times’ list of Best Fiction of 2000. Gordon has been a Fellow of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and the Bunting (now Radcliffe) Institute at Harvard. In 1991 she received an Academy-Institute Award for her fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Born in Baltimore, she now lives in Kalamazoo, and teaches at Western Michigan University and in the Prague Summer Program for Writers.
Carolyn Forché is the author of four books of poetry: Blue Hour (HarperCollins, 2004); The Angel of History (1994), which received the Los Angeles Times Book Award; The Country Between Us (1982), which received the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and was the Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets; and Gathering the Tribes (1976), which was selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets by Stanley Kunitz. She is also the editor of Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (1993). Among her translations are Mahmoud Darwish’s Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems with Munir Akash (2003), Claribel Alegria’s Flowers from the Volcano (1983), and Robert Desnos’s Selected Poetry (with William Kulik, 1991). Her honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1992, she received the Charity Randall Citation from the International Poetry Forum. Her most recent book is a memoir, The Horse on Our Balcony. Forché is director of the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University.
The Visiting Writers Series is co-sponsored by the Division of Academic Affairs, the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, and the English Department.
For more information, contact Carol Ann Davis at davisca@cofc.edu.
