Calendar of Events University of Connecticut All events are free and open to the public unless otherwise noted
Tuesday,
February 5
Sharon Bryan's fourth collection of poems, Stardust, will be published by BOA Editions in 2009. She is the author of three earlier books: Salt Air, Objects of Affection, and Flying Blind. Bryan is also the author of Where We Stand: Women Poets on Literary Tradition, and the co-editor, with William Olsen, of Planet on the Table: Poets on the Reading Life. Her poems have been honored with awards including two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Praising Bryan's writing, one reviewer noted that the poet "won't let any ordinary phrase off the hook as she dangles it, circling in brilliant focus."
Tuesday, February 19 Five undergraduate poets, selected by Connecticut poetry Circuit as the winners of the 2007-2008 Student Contest, will read from their work. They are Tess Bird (University of Connecticut), Lisa Butler (Manchester Community College), Chiara DiLello (Wesleyan University), Taylor Katz (Connecticut College), and Tyler Theofilos (Yale University). Tuesday,
February 26 Andrew Hudgins is the author of six volumes of poetry including Saints and Strangers, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; The Never-Ending, a finalist for the National Book Award; and the recent Ecstatic in the Poison. His work has been awarded the Witter Bynner Award for Poetry and the Hanes Poetry Prize, as well as fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Mark Strand lauds Hudgins's Ecstatic in the Poison, noting that it is "full of intelligence, vitality, and grace....Dark moments seem charged with an eerie luminosity and the most humdrum events assume a startling lyric intensity. A deep resonant humor is everywhere, and everwhere amazing." Thursday, March 20 Keith Gessen is a founding editor of n+1 journal and the author of the novel in stories, All The Sad Young Literary Men. His journalism and literary criticism have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books. His translation of Voices from Chernobyl won the National Book Critics Cirlce Award for Nonfiction in 2005. n+1, founded in the fall of 2004, is a twice-yearly journal of politics, literature, and culture. In 2006 it received the Utne Independent Press Award for Best Writing. Tuesday, March 25 Patricia Hampl, called "the queen of memoir" by the Los Angeles Times, first won recognition for A Romantic Education, her 1981 memoir about her Czech heritage. Hampl's other nonfiction works include the 2007 New York Times Notable Book The Florist's Daughter, praised by critics for its "indelible portraits" (People) and "enchanting prose" (Publisher's Weekly). She is also the author of Blue Arabesque: A Search for the Sublime, listed by the New York Times as a Notable Book of 2006; I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory, a finalist for the 2000 National Book Critics Circle Award; and Virgin Time: In Search of the Contemplative Life. Hampl's many awards include fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Ingram Merrill Foundation. Her writing, remarks The Chicago Tribune, links "the intellectual inquisitiveness of the essay with the narrative drive of the memoir to create nothing less than a conduit between self and culture." Thursday, April 3 James Ryan, a native of Rathdowney, Co. Laois, Ireland, is the author of the new novel South of the Border, set in the Irish midlands during World War II. His three earlier novels are Seeds of Doubt, Dismantling Mr. Doyle, and Home from England. Ryan's work often explores the rural Ireland of the 1930s and 1940s, navigating the conflicted terrain of generation and culture. The Irish Times has called his writing "meticulously patterned and psychologically concentrated," praising its "mastery of fictional structures and retrospective first person narration." Ryan teaches creative writing at University College, Dublin. Tuesday, April 22 & Wednesday, April 23 "Alice Fulton is not a safe poet; she's a daring, ambitious, and risk-taking one." So begins the Harvard Review's description of Fulton's most recent book, Cascade Experiment: Selected Poems. Fulton's previous book, Felt, was chosen by the Los Angeles Times as one of the Best Books of 2001 and as a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. It also won the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress.Fulton's earlier books of poetry include Sensual Math, Powers of Congress, Palladium, and Dance Script with Electric Ballerina, and she has also authored a collection of prose, Feeling as a Foreign Language: The Good Strangeness of Poetry. Her work has also been adapted for musical and theatrical productions. Anthony Cornicello's...turns and turns into the night, a setting of four poems from Sensual Math, premiered at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2001, while William Bolcom's setting of Fulton's "How to Swing Those Obbligatos Around" was first performed by Marilyn Horne at Carnegie Hall's Centennial Celebration. Ms. Fulton has received fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Reviewers have delighted in her "broad range of interests" and her "continual and evolving sense of how to use the most seemingly insignificant details to illuminate the nuances of difficult moral ideas." Thursday, May 1 Readings and display of works by student winners of the Long River Review's prestigious annual awards, including the Collins Literary Prizes, the Jennie Hackman Memorial Awards for Short Fiction, and the Glorianna Gill Art Awards.
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