Past Creative Writing Events
May 23, 6 pm - Institute for Creative Writing and Literary Translation Faculty Reading, Secchia Terrace.
May 30, 6pm - Matthew Kneale's Rome: A History in Seven Sackings, Secchia Terrace
To date Matthew Kneale has published 5 novels, 2 non-fiction history books and a volume of short stories. His novel ‘English Passengers’ was short-listed for the Booker Prize and won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award. His latest book is a non-fictional account of his adopted home: ‘Rome: a History in Seven Sackings.’
June 6, 6pm - Reading by Joanna Klink, Aula Magna
Joanna Klink's collections of poetry include They Are Sleeping (2000), Circadian (2007), Raptus (2010) and Excerpts from a Secret Prophecy (2015). Her work has been included in numerous anthologies, most recently Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now (2017) and The Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry (2011).
June 12, 6pm - Craft talk by Writer in Residence Dolen Perkins-Valdez, Aula Magna
June 18, 6pm - Reading by Dolen Perkins-Valdez, Aula Magna
Dolen Perkins-Valdez is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel WENCH. O, The Oprah Magazine chose it as a Top Ten Pick of the Month, and NPR named it a top 5 book club pick of 2010.
June 20, 6pm - Institute for Creative Writing and Literary Translation Student Reading, Secchia Terrace.
15 November 2017, 6:30-8:00 p.m., Aula Magna Regina, A Reading by Daniel Connelly from his new book Donkey See, Donkey Do—A Dream Sequence.
In Donkey See, Donkey Do, Daniel Roy Connelly restores to literature the largely-absent figure of the four-legged beast of burden. This picaresque pamphlet tracks the alien Donkey's descent to earth and meagre beginnings through his ascent to the pinnacle of British establishment. Donkey's satirical meanderings through society allow the author to bring his sharp yet absurd eye to questions of contemporary identity, British populist politics, cultural memory, and the everlasting Pons Asinorum.
"Daniel Roy Connelly is one of the most strikingly original writers I've heard in a while – witty, keenly insightful, with a droll, pitch-perfect sense of timing, his work feels like a refreshing wake-up call." – NAOMI SHIHAB NYE
"Daniel Roy Connelly is a crackerjack fabulist with top-banana timing. His wordplay is infectious." – HELEN IVORY
A former British diplomat, Daniel is a theatre director, actor and professor of creative writing, English and theatre at John Cabot University and the American University of Rome. He has acted in and directed theatre in America, the UK, Italy and China, where his 2009 production of David Henry Hwang's M Butterfly was forced to close by the Chinese secret police. His writing is widely published in print and online. He was the winner of the 2014 Fermoy International Poetry Festival Prize, a finalist in the 2015 Aesthetica Magazine Creative Writing Prize and winner of the 2015 Cúirt New Writing Prize for poetry.
25 October 2017, 6:30-8:00 p.m., Aula Magna Regina, Book Presentation: Anthony Molino's Translation of Paolo Febbraro's The Diary of Kaspar Hauser. Both the author and translator will participate in the event.
This intriguing gem of a book is a direct, germinal expression of the author's longstanding fascination with the figure of the Idiot in Western literature. Part notebook, part ethical treatise, part fantasized autobiography, The Diary of Kaspar Hauser is a striking collection of forty or so haiku-like compositions, diary entries imagined to have been penned by the "idiot" Kaspar Hauser and discovered, by chance, after his death by brutal murder, among the papers of his patron, Franz Paul Webern. (Franz is Kaspar's interlocutor throughout the poems.) This hyperpoetic component of the book – inspired by Werner Herzog's masterful film - is sandwiched between two essays: the first, an Introduction recounting the remarkable discovery and history of the fabled manuscript; the second, comprising a one-page Epilogue (which details the death of Kaspar) along with a letter in the form of an Appendix by a fictional, highly cultured, Borges-like literary critic who converses with the eponymous "Febbraro" about his startling, dreamlike find.
The book has all the characteristics – concision of language, fanciful flights of fiction and criticism in concentrated poetic form, sparse elements of theatrical dialogue, a fierce philosophical underpinning – to make for an "ancient novelty" of sorts: a daring book that surprises and forces us to rethink what we think we already know.
"Magnificent. Paolo Febbraro is an extraordinary poet and his Kaspar Hauser is a hymn to pure ingenuity and intelligence, a book that raises challenging questions." –Luis Sepùlveda
"What is this space with limitless temporalities and voices rendered with such beauty by Febbraro and translator Molino? It is our inner world, the realm of everything, and this precious poem is a gift to all of us." –Christopher Bollas
"Molino's versions capture the otherness of Febbraro's original extremely well, and have a disconcerting vitality to them." –Prof. Peter Hainsworth, University of Oxford
Paolo Febbraro was born in Rome in 1965. One of Italy's most ingenious and innovative writers, he is the author of four books of poetry: Il secondo fine (Marcos y Marcos, 1999), Il Diario di Kaspar Hauser (L'Obliquo, 2003), Il bene materiale. Poesie 1992-2007 (Scheiwiller, 2008) and Fuori per l'inverno (Nottetempo, 2014). Among his critical works: I poeti italiani della «Voce» (Marcos y Marcos, 1998); the anthology La critica militante (Poligrafico dello Stato, 2001); and noteworthy studies on figures such as Aldo Palazzeschi, Umberto Saba, Primo Levi, and Seamus Heaney. A regular contributor to the influential cultural pages of Italy's Il Sole 24 Ore, Febbraro has also authored a major critical study entitled L'idiota. Una storia letteraria [The Idiot: A Literary History]. His most recent book is the collection of short stories titled I grandi fatti (Pendragon, 2016)
Anthony Molino is a widely published psychoanalyst and award-winning translator from the Italian. His translations include Antonio Porta's Kisses from Another Dream (City Lights Books, 1987), Melusine (Guernica Editions, 1992) and Kisses, Dreams and Other Infidelities (Xenos Books, 2004); Valerio Magrelli's Nearsights (Graywolf Press, 1991) and The Contagion of Matter (Holmes & Meier, 2000); Lucio Mariani's Echoes of Memory (Wesleyan University Press, 2003) and Traces of Time (Open Letter Books, 2015), as well as two plays: Manlio Santanelli's Emergency Exit (with J. House, Xenos Books, 2000) and Eduardo De Filippo's The Nativity Scene (with P. Feinberg, Guernica Editions, 1997, also anthologized in 20th Century Italian Drama, Columbia University Press, 1995). For Chelsea Editions he has edited Magrelli's Instructions on How to Read a Newspaper and Other Poems (2008), which includes a re-issue of Nearsights.
18 October 2017, 6:30-8:00 p.m., Aula Magna Regina, Book Presentation: Frederika Randall's translation of Guido Morselli's The Communist.
Walter Ferranini is an Italian Communist. Organizer of farm cooperatives, working to build the new revolutionary order. A veteran of the fight against Franco in Spain and of seven years of exile in the US. By the late 1950s, now a deputy in the Italian parliament, he's puzzled by PCI's "de-Stalinization" drive. The puritanical party disapproves of his relationship with Nuccia, a tender, quizzical, deeply intelligent editor—because she's married. Worried about his health, bedevilled by knotty questions of theory and practice, Walter is and always will be a Communist, yet somehow his political faith no longer explains the life he is living or the future he dreamed of.
Pittsburgh-born Frederika Randall has lived in Italy for 30 years, writing for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Nation and Italian weekly Internazionale. Since 2004 she's dedicated herself to translation, including books and stories by Luigi Meneghello, Ippolito Nievo, Helena Janeczek, Sergio Luzzatto, Ottavio Cappellani, Igiaba Scego, Giacomo Sartori and Davide Orecchio. With historian Luzzatto, she received the 2011 Cundill Prize. Nievo's 19th century novel Confessions of an Italian made New Yorker and New Statesman "best books of 2014". Her translation of Primo Levi's Resistance was shortlisted for the 2017 Italian Prose in Translation Award. She likes to work on books that defy translation.
4 October 2017, 6:30-8:00 p.m. Aula Magna Regina, A Reading by Michael Sharkey
Michael Sharkey is an Australian poet, editor (2014-1016) of the Australian Poetry Journal and author of a dozen collections of poems, most recent of which is In the Real World and other poems (2017). His previous collection, Another Fine Morning in Paradise (2012), was awarded the Grace Leven Prize for best poetry book of the year. The Poetic Eye: Occasional Writing 1982-2012 was published by Brill in 2017. Michael has worked in publishing, editing and reviewing books, and for many years taught English literatures and rhetorical studies in universities in Australia, New Zealand, and China, and summer schools in Germany.
20 September 2017, 6:30-8:00 p.m., Secchia Terrace, Reading by Daniel Connelly from his memoir Extravagant Stranger.
At once personal and hauntingly universal, Extravagant Stranger is the compelling memoir of self-professed 'global scalliwag' Daniel Roy Connelly – former diplomat, theatre director, Shakespeare scholar and conscience-stricken father. Laced with international intrigue and hilarious moments of well-aimed self-scrutiny, here is a book – like the life it relates – truly without comparison.
"These are glowing, moving prose poems of hallucinatory intensity. The wit and bracing honesty of the memories, from awkward to adulatory, take you through a powerfully personal journey (for the reader as much as the writer) in each poem and in the sequence overall. The sense of timing is exquisite. A masterclass in how to turn a scene, a moment, so that it catches the light just so in the final sentence. Connelly combines the autobiographical courage of Heaney and Hill with the symbolic technique and the reach and ambition of the French masters of the form and the effect is mesmerising." – LUKE KENNARD (Transition, Cain)
A former British diplomat, Daniel is a theatre director, actor and professor of creative writing, English and theatre at John Cabot University and the American University of Rome. He has acted in and directed theatre in America, the UK, Italy and China, where his 2009 production of David Henry Hwang's M Butterfly was forced to close by the Chinese secret police. His writing is widely published in print and online. He was the winner of the 2014 Fermoy International Poetry Festival Prize, a finalist in the 2015 Aesthetica Magazine Creative Writing Prize and winner of the 2015 Cúirt New Writing Prize for poetry.
20 June, 6:30-8 pm, Aula Magna Regina, Reading by Sarah Wetzel.
Sarah Wetzel is the author of River Electric with Light, which won the AROHO Poetry Publication Prize and was published by Red Hen Press in 2015, and Bathsheba Transatlantic, which won the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry and was published in 2010. Sarah teaches creative writing workshops at Tel Aviv University and Bar Ilan University in Israel, and, when they let her, at The American University of Rome while splitting time between Manhattan, Tel Aviv, and Rome. You can read more of her work at www.sarahwetzel.com
14 June, 6:30-8pm, Aula Magna Regina, Reading by Writer in Residence Frederic Tuten, Introduced by Chiara Barzini.
13 June, 6:30-8pm, Aula Magna Regina, Craft Talk by Writer in Residence Frederic Tuten. Introduced by former JCU Writer in Residence Edmund White.
7 June, 6:30-8pm, Aula Magna Regina, Reading by Iris Smyles
Award winning author of the novels Iris Has Free Time and Dating Tips for the Unemployed, Iris Smyles has published short stories and essays in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, BOMB, Vogue, The New York Observer, Paris Review Daily, Guernica, McSweeny's Internet Tendency, and Best American Travel Writing among other publications, anthologies, and artist catalogs. She was a humor columnist for Splice Today, edited and wrote the afterword for the cult humor book The Capricious Critic, and lives in New York City and online at www.IrisSmyles.com.
6 June, 6:30-9pm, Aula Magna Regina, Screening of film, Possession, followed by discussion with screenwriter, Writer in Residence Frederic Tuten.
31 May, 6:30-8pm, Aula Magna Regina, Writer in Residence Frederic Tuten, Conversation on Modern Art, Writers and Painters, and Roy Lichtenstein.
Frederic Tuten has written about art, literature and film in several periodicals including Art Forum, The New York Times, Vogue; was an actor in an Alain Resnais movie; taught with Paul Bowles in Morocco; co-wrote the cult-classic film Possession, and along the way, earned a PhD in literature, three Pushcart Prizes, an O. Henry Prize Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is the author of five novels: The Adventures of Mao on the Long March; Tintin in the New World; Tallien: A Brief Romance; Van Gogh's Bad Café; The Green Hour; and a book of inter-related short stories: Self Portraits: Fictions.
30 May, 6:30-8pm, Aula Magna Regina, Reading by American Academy in Rome, Rome Prize-Winning Writers Jack Livings and Matthew Null.
Jack Livings' story collection The Dog won the 2015 PEN / Robert W. Bingham Prize, was a Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers pick, a Times Literary Supplement Best Book of the Year, and one of New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani's top ten books of 2014. His stories have appeared in A Public Space, The Paris Review, Tin House, StoryQuarterly, and Best American Short Stories and have been awarded two Pushcart Prizes. He was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford and is currently the John Guare Writer's Fund Rome Prize in Literature Fellow at the American Academy in Rome.
Matthew Neill Null is author of the story collection Allegheny Front (Sarabande) and the novel Honey from the Lion (Lookout), which is also forthcoming from Bompiani in Italian translation. A writer from West Virginia, he is the recipient of the O. Henry Award and the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. He is currently the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize Fellow in Literature at the American Academy in Rome.
Wednesday, March 22, 2017, 6:30-8:00pm, Guarini Campus, G.1.1, A reading by Rod Mengham
Rod Mengham is Reader in Modern English Literature at Cambridge University and Curator of Works of Art at Jesus College, Cambridge. He has collaborated with Marc Atkins on Sounding Pole Films and Still Moving (Veer, 2014). He has also published monographs on Dickens, Bronte and Henry Green; edited collections of essays on contemporary fiction, violence and avant-garde art, fiction of the 1940s, Australian poetry; anthologies Altered State: the New Polish Poetry (2003), Vanishing Points: New Modernist Poems (2005); poetry, most recently Chance of a Storm (Carcanet, 2015) and translations, most recently Speedometry [poems by Andrzej Sosnowski] (Contraband, 2014).
Wednesday, March 8, 2017, 7:15-8:30 pm, Guarini Campus, Aula Magna Regina, A reading by Patrick Williamson
Patrick Williamson, a British poet and translator, lives in France. He also works with music and film-poems (Afterwords, set to music by Mauro Coceano). His work is increasingly focused on Italy, where he has published two collections: Beneficato (English-Italian, Samuele Editore, Pordenone, 2015), and Nel Santuario (Samuele Editore, 2013; Menzione Speciale della Giuria in the XV Concorso Guido Gozzano in 2014). Editor and translator of The Parley Tree, An Anthology of Poets from French-speaking Africa and the Arab World (Arc Publications, 2012). Recent and ongoing translations of poetry by Italian writers Guido Cupani and Erri de Luca.
Wednesday, October 12, 2016, 6:30-8:00 p.m., Aula Magna Regina, Guarini Campus, A reading by Donigan Merritt.
Donigan Merritt was born in southwest Arkansas and left home at the age of seventeen. He has worked as a journalist, scuba diver, fishing boat captain, sailing instructor, and university professor. He has BA and MA degrees in philosophy; the BA is with Honors from Simpson College, the MA is from the Claremont Graduate School. He also has a Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing from the University of Iowa. His first novel, One Easy Piece, was published by Coward-McCann in 1981. Since then, he has published eight novels, including Possessed by Shadows and The Common Bond.
Wednesday, June 22, 2016, 6:30-8:00 p.m., Secchia Terrace, CW Institute Student Reading and Farewell Party.
Students enrolled in Creative Writing classes over the summer will read from their work.
Tuesday, June 21, 2016, 6:30-8:00 p.m., Aula Magna Regina, Guarini Campus, A reading by Cynthia Zarin
Cynthia Zarin is the author of five books of poetry, including "Orbit" ( Knopf, 2017), five books for children, and a collection of essays "An Enlarged Heart: A Personal History" (Knopf, 2013). Her honors and awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Peter B. Lavan Award, an Ingram Merrill Award, and The Los Angeles Times Book Award. A longtime contributor to The New Yorker, she is an Artist-in-Residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and Resident Writer for the New York-based dance company, BalletCollective. She teaches at Yale, where she directs the Senior Concentration in Creative Writing.
Monday, June 20, 2016, 6:30-8:00 p.m., Aula Magna Regina, Guarini Campus, CW Institute Craft Talk: 2016 Writer in Residence Susan Minot. Introduced by Cynthia Zarin
Wednesday, June 15, 2016, 6:30-8:00 p.m., Aula Magna Regina, Guarini Campus, CW Institute Reading by 2016 Writer in Residence Susan Minot. Introduced by Elizabeth Geoghegan and George Minot.
Susan Minot is an award-winning novelist, short-story writer, poet, and screenwriter. Her first novel, Monkeys, was published in a dozen countries and won the Prix Femina Étranger in France. Her novel Evening was a worldwide best seller and became a major motion picture. She wrote the screenplay for Bernardo Bertolucci's Stealing Beauty. Her most recent book is Thirty Girls, a novel set in Kenya and Uganda. She teaches in New York City where she lives with her daughter.
Thursday, June 9, 2016, 6:00-8:30 p.m., Aula Magna Regina, Guarini Campus, New Play: If Lear had a Lawyer by Don Carroll. Staged Reading and Post-Show Discussion with directors Harriet Power and Robert Hedley.
Don Carroll is an American attorney who practices in Rome and is the author of the monthly law column "Closing Argument" that appears in the online magazine The American/In Italia. He has performed and directed with the English theatre companies in Rome and in 2014 directed the John Cabot University and The English Theatre of Rome's dramatic reading of Flannery O'Connor's Parker's Back commemorating the author's life and writings. If Lear had a Lawyer is his first play and is based on his article of the same name published in the Lincoln Center Theatre Review (Winter/Spring 2004) commenting on Shakespeare's King Lear from a lawyer's perspective.
Harriet Power is an award-winning director based in Philadelphia. She's worked extensively with new plays at Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (London), New Dramatists (NYC), PlayPenn (Philadelphia), Bay Area Playwrights Festival, West Coast Playwrights, Iowa Playwrights Festival, & the International Women Playwrights Festival (Dublin). Her awards include 3 Barrymore nominations for "Outstanding Direction," winning for Angels in American: Perestroika. She's also Professor of Theatre, head of graduate directing, & Graduate Theatre Thesis Director at Villanova University.
Robert Hedley co-founded The Philadelphia Theatre Company and West Coast Playwrights. He was a master teacher at Bay Area Playwrights Festival, and served as playwrights' mentor at the Mark Taper Forum (Los Angeles) and guest speaker on new writing at the Lincoln Center Directors Lab. In 2012, he was awarded a writing residency at Civitella Ranieri in Umbria, Italy. He has directed professionally in Philadelphia, New York, and San Francisco and was Artistic Director of the Iowa Shakespeare Festival. Among his many honors, Robert received the Barrymore Lifetime Achievement Award.
Wednesday, June 8, 2016, 6:30-8:00 p.m., Aula Magna Regina, Guarini Campus, A reading by Jonathan Levi.
U.S. writer Jonathan Levi is the author of the 1992 novel A Guide for the Perplexed and Septimania (April 2016, The Overlook Press), as well as many plays and opera libretti that have been performed internationally. A founding editor of Granta magazine, Levi has written political and cultural journalism for The New York Times, The Nation, Conde Nast Traveler, and many other publications. He currently lives in Rome and is artistic advisor to the Zaubersee Festival in Lucerne, Switzerland, and co-director of the Gabriel García Márquez Fellowship in Cultural Journalism in Cartagena, Colombia.
Tuesday, June 7, 2016, 6:30-8:00 p.m., Aula Magna Regina, Guarini Campus, A reading by Aidan Fadden and Daniel Connelly.
A former British diplomat, Daniel Roy Connelly holds a degree in English literature from Columbia University and a doctorate from The University of Saint Andrews. He has acted in and directed theatre in America, the UK, Italy and China. His poetry is widely published online and in print. He was the winner of the 2014 Fermoy International Poetry Festival Prize, a finalist in the 2015 Aesthetica Magazine Creative Writing Prize and winner of the 2015 Cuirt New Writing Prize for poetry. His recent work has been published by The North, The Transnational (in German), Ink, Sweat and Tears and Critical Survey.
Aiden Fadden is an adjunct professor at John Cabot University and a freelance translator and editor. His poems have appeared in the U.K. in Stand, The North, Magma, Lunar Poetry, Cordite (Australia)and in translation in Italian publications including Pagine and Sagarana. He has also reviewed for PN Review, Fortnight and The Contemporary Poetry Review.
Monday, June 6, 2016, 6:30-8:00 p.m., Aula Magna Regina, Guarini Campus, A reading by Susan Bradley Smith.
Susan Bradley Smith began her professional writing life as a rock journalist in Sydney and London and has since worked as an academic in both Australia and the UK. An award-winning writer, her most recent books are the poetry collection Beds For All Who Come, and the writing and wellbeing memoir Friday Forever. Currently in Rome on an Australia Council grant, Susan is completing her first novel, Wait until Tomorrow, about surfing culture and Arcadian dreaming. Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Curtin University, Perth, her favorite things always involve the ocean, and music.
Wednesday, June 1, 2016, 6:30-8:00 p.m., Aula Magna Regina, Guarini Campus, A reading
by Charles Lambert and Matthew Licht.
Charles Lambert was born in the United Kingdom but has lived in Italy for most of
his adult life. His latest novel, The Children's Home, described by Kirkus Reviews
as 'a one-of-a-kind literary horror story', is set in neither country. Earlier books
include three novels, a collection of prize-winning short stories and a memoir, With
a Zero at its Heart, selected by the Guardian as one of its top ten books from 2014.
Matthew Licht lived in a former convent as a youth, and bore witness to the wanderings of celibate wraiths. His latest story collection Justine, Joe & the Zen Garbageman features the harrowing specter of Gertrude Stein.
Tuesday, May 31, 2016, 6:30-8:00 p.m., Aula Magna Regina, Guarini Campus, A reading by Peter Hughes.
Peter Hughes is a poet and the founding editor of Oystercatcher Press. His Selected Poems was published by Shearsman in 2013 along with 'An intuition of the particular': some essays on the poetry of Peter Hughes, edited by Ian Brinton. 2013 also saw the publication of Allotment Architecture, by Reality Street. The same press published Peter's versions of the complete sonnets of Petrarch under the title Quite Frankly in 2015. The first part of his Cavalcanti project is available from Equipage. The complete Cavalcanti will be out from Carcanet in 2017.
Monday, May 30, 2016, 6:30-8:00 p.m., Room G.G.1, Guarini Campus, Women Writers & The Art of the Short Story: A Tribute to Lucia Berlin, with Francesca Marciano, Chiara Barzini, and Elizabeth Geoghegan.
Lucia Berlin (1936-2004) worked brilliantly but sporadically throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Her stories are inspired by her early childhood in various Western mining towns; her glamorous teenage years in Santiago, Chile; three failed marriages; a lifelong problem with alcoholism; her years spent in Berkeley, New Mexico, and Mexico City; and the various jobs she later held to support her writing and her four sons. Sober and writing steadily by the 1990s, she took a visiting writer's post at the University of Colorado Boulder in 1994 and was soon promoted to associate professor. In 2001, in failing health, she moved to Southern California to be near her sons. She died in 2004 in Marina del Rey.
Chiara Barzini is an Italian screen and fiction writer. She has lived and studied in the United States, working as a correspondent for Vanity Fair, GQ, Flair, XL Repubblica, and Marie Claire, while publishing essays in American magazines such as the Village Voice, Harper's, Vogue, Interview Magazine, Vice, and Rolling Stone. Films written by her have been distributed in Italy, Spain, Japan, and Latin America. She is the author of the short story collection Sister Stop Breathing (Calamari Press, 2012) and the forthcoming novel Things That Happened Before The Earthquake (Knopf Doubleday, 2017.) She currently lives in Rome with her partner and children.
Elizabeth Geoghegan writes in English, dreams in Italian, and wishes she could remember how to speak French. She is the author of Natural Disasters: Stories and The Marco Chronicles: To Rome Without Love, a Kindle bestseller, winner of the Travelers' Tales Solas Gold Prize for Memoir, and selected for The Best Travel Writing, Volume 10. Most recently, her essay about her friend and mentor, "Smoking with Lucia Berlin," was among The Paris Review's "Best of 2015." Geoghegan earned her MFA in Fiction Writing from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago and her MA in Creative Writing from The University of Colorado at Boulder. She lives in Rome on a dead-end street between a convent and a jail.
Wednesday, May 25, 2016, 6:30-8:00 p.m, Secchia Terrace, Guarini Campus, CW Institute Faculty Reading and Welcome Party.
The Summer 2016 faculty of the Institute for Creative Writing and Literary Translation will read from their work. Readers to include: Michael Carroll, Elizabeth Geoghegan, George Minot, Elena Buia Rutt, Mike Treanor and David Keplinger.
Tuesday, February 2, 2016, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Aula Magna Regina, Guarini Campus, Dacia Maraini Event.
An iconic figure in Italian cultural life as well as a tireless social activist, Ms. Maraini has received many literary awards, including the prestigious Premio Campiello and Premio Strega. She is the author of many novels and more than sixty plays performed in Italy and abroad. In 1973 she founded the Teatro della Maddalena, managed exclusively by women. Her latest novel is Chiara Di Assisi. Elogio della disobbedienza (2013). Her works have been translated into 22 languages.
Wednesday, 24 June 2015, 6:30-8:00 p.m., Aula Magna Regina, Guarini Campus, Craft Talk by Writer in Residence, Edmund White.
Edmund White is the author of twenty-five books. He is best known for his biography of French writer Jean Genet, for which he won the National Book Critics Circle Award. White is also the author of a trilogy of autobiographical novels: A Boy's Own Story, The Beautiful Room is Empty, and The Farewell Symphony.
White's most recent memoir is Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris, which was released in 2014. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, an officer in the French Order of Arts and Letters and a winner of the France-Amériques award. He is a professor at Princeton University and lives in New York City.
Tuesday, 23 June 2015, 6:30-8:00 p.m., Aula Magna Regina, Guarini Campus, a reading by Students.
Monday, 22 June 2015, 6:30-8:00 p.m., Aula Magna Regina, Guarini Campus, a reading by Michael Carroll.
Michael Carroll was born in Memphis, grew up in northern Florida, and lives in New York. He's been a Peace Corps volunteer, a waiter, a janitor, a writer's assistant, and a college instructor. His work has appeared in Boulevard, Ontario Review, Southwest Review, The Yale Review, Open City, and Animal Shelter, as well as in such anthologies as The New Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories (edited by David Leavitt and Mark Mitchell).
He collaborated with Edmund White on the suspense story "Excavation" for Joyce Carol Oates' New Jersey Noir. His interviews with Ann Beattie and Wells Tower were included in the recently revamped Chattahoochee Review, where his first story was published, and where he is New York Editor.
His first collection, Little Reef and Other Stories, was published in June 2014 by the University of Wisconsin Press, and is the 2015 winner of the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction awarded by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Tuesday, 16 June 2015, 9:00 p.m., Piazza del Campidoglio. Casa delle Letterature, in collaboration with John Cabot University, presenting Edmund White.
Monday, 15 June 2015, 6:30-8:00 p.m., Aula Magna Regina, Guarini Campus, a reading by the Faculty.
Monday, 8 June 2015, 6:30-8:00 p.m., Aula Magna Regina, Guarini Campus, a reading by Adelaide Basile.
Wednesday, 3 June 2015, 6:30-8:00 p.m., Aula Magna Regina, Guarini Campus, a reading by Matthew Kneale.
Monday, 1 June 2015, 6:30-8:00 p.m., Aula Magna Regina, Guarini Campus, Literary Translation presentation by literary
translator Oonagh Stransky, Forget about Getting Rich and other Joys of Being a Literary Translator.
Tuesday, 26 May 2015, 6:30-8:00 p.m., Aula Magna Regina, Guarini Campus, Reading by poet Kevin Brophy and a presentation of his work 'Walking: New and Selected Poems,' which was shortlisted for the WA Premiers Prize of Poetry.
Tuesday, 28 April 2015, 6:30-8:00 p.m., Aula Magna Regina, Guarini Campus, Reading by Pulitzer Prize nominated author Jerry Ellis, for his novel Walking the Trail.
Tuesday, 21 April 2015, 6:30-8:00 p.m., Aula Magna Regina, Guarini Campus, book presentation by the poet Luciano Mariani and translator Tony Molino of Lucio Mariani's collection of poetry TRACES OF TIME
Tuesday, 17 March 2015, 6:30-8:00 p.m., Aula Magna Regina, Guarini Campus, Reading by Marianne Boruch, co-sponsored by the Department of English Language and Literature
Marianne Boruch's eight poetry collections include the recent Cadaver, Speak, and The Book of Hours, a Kingsley-Tufts Poetry Award winner. Her prose includes two essay collections, In the Blue Pharmacy and Poetry’s Old Air, and a memoir, The Glimpse Traveler. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, London Review of Books, American Poetry Review, The Nation and elsewhere. She's been a Guggenheim and NEA Fellow, had residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, and the Bellagio Center. A 2012 Fulbright Professor in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1987, she established and directed Purdue University’s MFA Program, in which she still teaches. She’s also on faculty in the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Tuesday, 14 April 2015, 6:30-8:00 p.m., Aula Magna Regina, Guarini Campus, reading by poet David Starkey.
David Starkey served as Santa Barbara’s 2009-2010 Poet Laureate and is Director of the Creative Writing Program at Santa Barbara City College. His poetry has appeared in many journals, including The American Scholar, The Georgia Review and The Southern Review, and in seven full-length collections, most recently Like a Soprano, an episode-by-episode revisioning of The Sopranos television series.
Tuesday, 10 March, 2015, 6:30-8:00 p.m., Aula Magna Regina, Guarini Campus, Reading by Matthew Licht
Matthew Licht learned to write before two extremely tough audiences: the readership of a magazine popular among the incarcerated and/or mentally handicapped, and the 4th and 5th grades of a New York Public School. His story collections, The Moose Show and Justine, Joe & the Zen Garbageman (both Salt Pubs.) have been nominated for the Frank O’Connor Prize. His multimedia e-novel The Withering Fire (Speider & Fisch) is due out soon.
Tuesday, 3 March, 2015, 6:30-8:00 p.m., Aula Magna Regina, Guarini Campus, Documenting the Beats: A Conversation with Bill Morgan, Beat Friend, and Archivist
Bill Morgan is an American writer, editor, and painter, best known for his work as an archivist and bibliographer for public figures such as Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Abbie Hoffman and Timothy Leary.
Tuesday, 17 February, 2015, 6:30-8:00 p.m., Aula Magna Regina, Guarini Campus, Joint Reading and Presentation by Paula Derrow and Elizabeth Geoghegan
Elizabeth Geoghegan is the author of Natural Disasters: Stories and the memoir The Marco Chronicles, to Rome without Love, a best-selling Kindle Short Read, both published by Shebooks. Her work has also appeared in The Best Travel Writing Volume 10, Nerve.com's Sex Advice From, The Cream City Review, Lotus-eater and other journals. Geoghegan’s writing explores the intersection between geography and intimacy. She is at work on a collection of short stories and a novel set in Southeast Asia. She has lived in Italy since 1999.
Paula Derrow's writing has appeared in the The New York Times, More Magazine, Self, Redbook, Yoga Journal, Woman's Day and Good Housekeeping. She is an acquiring editor for Shebooks, and editor of the Publisher's Weekly-starred anthology Behind the Bedroom Door: Getting It, Giving It, Loving It, Missing It, a collection of essays by best selling women authors about sex in real life. She teaches personal essay writing at City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism and is currently working on a memoir about being a late bloomer.
Tuesday, 10 February 2015, 6:30-8:00 p.m., Aula Magna Regina, Guarini Campus, Reading by Annamaria Alfieri
Described as Out of Africa meets Agatha Christie, Strange Gods takes you to the burgeoning town of Nairobi, British East Africa in 1911. There, Annamaria Alfieri captures the beauty and danger of the African wild and the complexities of imposing a culture on a foreign land.
Tuesday, 3 February 2015, 6:30-8:00 p.m., Aula Magna Regina, Guarini Campus, Reading by Andrija Matic
Andrija Matić (1978) was born in Kragujevac, Serbia. He received his Ph. D. in English
Literature from the University of Belgrade, Serbia. His novels include A Blackout in Five Images (2013), Manhole (2009), and The Disappearance of Zdenko Kupresanin (2006). His collection of short stories is entitled The Museum of Modern Art (2010). He is also
the author of T. S. Eliot: A Poet, Critic, Playwright (2007). Andrija Matić lives in Istanbul, Turkey.
Thursday, 5 December 2013, 7:30 p.m., Reading by renowned author Jhumpa Lahiri
John Cabot University's Creative Writing Institute is honored to present a reading by renowned author Jhumpa Lahiri.
Ms. Lahiri will be reading from her recent novel The Lowland, which was shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize.
Born in London, Lahiri moved to Rhode Island as a young child with her Bengali parents. Her abilities to convey cultural conflicts in the most immediate fashion and to achieve the voices of many different characters are among the unique qualities that have captured the attention of a wide audience.
Ms Lahiri received the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for Interpreter of Maladies, her debut story collection that explores issues of love and identity among immigrants and cultural transplants. Her novel The Namesake expands on the perplexities of the immigrant experience and the search for identity.
The Namesake was chosen as this year's book for Italy Reads 2013, John Cabot University's community-based English language reading and cultural exchange program.
Alongside the Pulitzer Prize, Jhumpa Lahiri also won the PEN/Hemingway Award, an O. Henry Prize (for the short story "Interpreter of Maladies"), the Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Vallombrosa Von Rezzori Prize and the Asian American Literary Award. Lahiri was also granted a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002 and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 2006.
John Cabot University is pleased to announce that the Writer in Residence for 2013 will be Jhumpa Lahiri. Ms Lahiri received the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for Interpreter of Maladies, her debut story collection that explores issues of love and identity among immigrants and cultural transplants. Her novel The Namesake was published in the fall of 2003 to great acclaim. The Namesake expands on the perplexities of the immigrant experience and the search for identity.
Tuesday, 13 August 2013, 8:00-10:00p.m., A Joint Book Presentation, in collaboration with Wanted in Rome, of Sam Cabot's Blood of the Lamb , the new thriller co-written by JCU English Professor Carlos Dews and award-winning mystery writer S.J. Rozan, and Conor Fitzgerald's The Memory Key, An Alec Blume Novel.
Carlos Dews is Chair of JCU's Department of English Language and Literature as well as Director of the Institute for Creative Writing and Literary Translation. His books include his edition of The Complete Novels of Carson McCullers (Library of America), and Illumination and Night Glare: The Unfinished Autobiography of Carson McCullers (University of Wisconsin). With Carolyn Leste Law, Dews edited Out in the South (Temple) and This Fine Place So Far From Home: Voices of Academics from the Working Class (Temple).
S. J. Rozan a native New Yorker, is the author of twelve novels. Her work has won numerous awards including the Edgar, Shamus, Anthony, Nero, and Macavity awards for Best Novel and the Edgar for Best Short Story.
Conor Fitzgerald has lived in Ireland, the UK, the United States and Italy. He has worked as an arts editor, produced a current affairs journal for foreign embassies based in Rome, and founded a successful translation company. He is married with two children and lives in Rome. The Namesake is the third in his series of Italian Crime novels.
Friday, 21 June 2013, 7:30p.m., Reading by Writer in Residence Jhumpa Lahiri.
Location: La Sala Grande in San Lorenzo in Miranda, Roman Forum.
Free ticket required .
Thursday, 20 June 2013, 7:30 p.m., "A Conversation with Jhumpa Lahiri", Writer in
Residence and announcement of the winners of Italy Writes.
Free ticket required .
Ms Lahiri received the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for Interpreter of Maladies, her debut story collection that explores issues of love and identity among immigrants and cultural transplants. Her novel The Namesake expands on the perplexities of the immigrant experience and the search for identity. This novel has been selected as the focus of John Cabot University's program 2013 Italy Reads.
Born in London, Lahiri moved to Rhode Island as a young child with her Bengali parents. Her abilities to convey cultural conflicts in the most immediate fashion and to achieve the voices of many different characters are among the unique qualities that have captured the attention of a wide audience.
Alongside the Pulitzer Prize, Jhumpa Lahiri also won the PEN/Hemingway Award, an O. Henry Prize (for the short story "Interpreter of Maladies"), the Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Vallombrosa Von Rezzori Prize and the Asian American Literary Award. Lahiri was also granted a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002 and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 2006.
Wednesday, 19 June 2013, 7:30 p.m., Student & Faculty Reading including the finalists of Italy Writes . Location: the Secchia Terrace, Guarini Campus
Monday, 17 June 2013, 7:30 p.m., Reading by Francesca Marciano
Francesca Marciano was born in Rome and lived in the US and in Kenya for many years. She is a film writer
and the author of three novels published in the US by Pantheon: "Rules of The Wild", a love story within the close-knit tribe of expats living in East Africa; "Casa Rossa", a family saga spanning thirty years set in a farmhouse in Puglia; "The End of Manners", a story about two women – a photographer and a war correspondent – travelling through
war-ravaged Afghanistan. Francesca has also written several film scripts, mostly
for Italian cinema. ("I am not scared" by G. Salvatores, "Io e te" by B. Bertolucci, and recently "Miele" by V. Golino among others) . She uses both Italian and English in her writing, although
when writing fiction, she writes in English. She is currently working on a new collection
of short stories due to be out in March 2014.
Thursday, 6 June 2013, 7:30 p.m., Reading by Maria Grazia Calandrone
Maria Grazia Calandrone is a poet, theatre writer, performer, writer and broadcaster of cultural programs
with Radio 3, literary critic for Poesia and for the newspaper Il Manifesto. Her books of poetry include Pietra di paragone ["Touchstone"] (Tracce, 1998) which was published as the winner of the New Writers
Award, 1997 La scimmia randagia ["The stray monkey"] (Crocetti, 2003 ) which received the Pasolini Award for the
Debut Work and Sulla bocca di tutti ["On everyone's lips"] (Crocetti, 2010) which received the Napoli, Sassari and Prata
Award. A series of her poems are in Nuovi poeti italiani 6 (Einaudi, 2012) and appear in anthologies and magazines of several European and American
countries, including John Cabot University's InVerse anthology of poetry (2008-2009). In 1993 she won the eleventh edition of the Montale
Award for unpublished works. Her poetry has been translated into: Czech, French, Japanese,
Greek, English, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Sirian, Spanish, Swedish, German
and Turkish. Maria Grazia lives in Rome.
Friday, 31 May 2013, 7:30 p.m., Reading by Elizabeth Geoghegan
Elizabeth Geoghegan earned an MFA in Writing from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago and an MA in Fiction from The University of Colorado at Boulder where her graduate thesis The Sound of Skin was selected for the Ruth Murray Underhill Award. Her writing has appeared in The Cream City Review, Bombay Gin, Nerve.com's Sex Advice From, and other publications. Her essay "Unholy Anguish: Teaching Flannery O'Connor in Rome" is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. A freelance stylist, she has worked with The Smashing Pumpkins, Christian Dior, People Magazine, and Vanity Fair, and in 2009 she produced the award-winning short film Benedizione delle Bestie. Geoghegan will read from her story collection The Book of Boys, which she is currently completing alongside an untitled novel.
Tuesday, 23 April 2013, 7:30 p.m., Andrea di Robilant
Andrea di Robilant is a journalist and writer who divides his time between Rome and Venice. Born and raised in Italy, he studied history and politics at Columbia University and spent many years in the United States as a correspondent for the Italian dailies La Repubblica and La Stampa. He is the author of three books of non-fiction. A Venetian Affair, a New York Times "notable book of the year", is an account of a clandestine love story set in eighteenth century Venice. Lucia: A Venetian Life in the Age of Napoleon is widely praised biography of the author's ancestor, Lucia Mocenigo. His third book, Irresistible North, published in the UK as Venetian Navigators, tells the story of Nicolò and Antonio Zen, two Venetian brothers who sailed to the North Atlantic at the end of the fourteenth century. He is currently at work on a a book about mapping the world in Renaissance Venice.
Sunday, 24 March 2013, 7:00-9:00 p.m., David Starkey
David Starkey will read from his new book, Circus Maximus, poems about Rome. Starkey is an accomplished poet who directs the creative writing program at Santa Barbara City College. Among his poetry collections are Starkey's Book of States (Boson Books, 2007), Adventures of the Minor Poet (Artamo Press, 2007), Ways of Being Dead: New and Selected Poems (Artamo, 2006), David Starkey's Greatest Hits (Pudding House, 2002) and Fear of Everything, winner of Palanquin Press's Spring 2000 chapbook contest. In addition, over the past twenty years he has published more than 400 poems in prestigious literary journals and he has also written two textbooks: Creative Writing: Four Genres in Brief (Bedford/St. Martin's, 2008) – which is regularly used at JCU - and Poetry Writing: Theme and Variations (McGraw-Hill, 1999).
Thursday, 5 December 2013, 7:30 p.m., Reading by renowned author Jhumpa Lahiri
John Cabot University's Creative Writing Institute is honored to present a reading by renowned author Jhumpa Lahiri.
Ms. Lahiri will be reading from her recent novel The Lowland, which was shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize.
Born in London, Lahiri moved to Rhode Island as a young child with her Bengali parents. Her abilities to convey cultural conflicts in the most immediate fashion and to achieve the voices of many different characters are among the unique qualities that have captured the attention of a wide audience.
Ms Lahiri received the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for Interpreter of Maladies, her debut story collection that explores issues of love and identity among immigrants and cultural transplants. Her novel The Namesake expands on the perplexities of the immigrant experience and the search for identity.
The Namesake was chosen as this year's book for Italy Reads 2013, John Cabot University's community-based English language reading and cultural exchange program.
Alongside the Pulitzer Prize, Jhumpa Lahiri also won the PEN/Hemingway Award, an O. Henry Prize (for the short story "Interpreter of Maladies"), the Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Vallombrosa Von Rezzori Prize and the Asian American Literary Award. Lahiri was also granted a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002 and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 2006.
John Cabot University is pleased to announce that the Writer in Residence for 2013 will be Jhumpa Lahiri. Ms Lahiri received the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for Interpreter of Maladies, her debut story collection that explores issues of love and identity among immigrants and cultural transplants. Her novel The Namesake was published in the fall of 2003 to great acclaim. The Namesake expands on the perplexities of the immigrant experience and the search for identity.
Tuesday, 13 August 2013, 8:00-10:00p.m., A Joint Book Presentation, in collaboration with Wanted in Rome, of Sam Cabot's Blood of the Lamb , the new thriller co-written by JCU English Professor Carlos Dews and award-winning mystery writer S.J. Rozan, and Conor Fitzgerald's The Memory Key, An Alec Blume Novel.
Carlos Dews is Chair of JCU's Department of English Language and Literature as well as Director of the Institute for Creative Writing and Literary Translation. His books include his edition of The Complete Novels of Carson McCullers (Library of America), and Illumination and Night Glare: The Unfinished Autobiography of Carson McCullers (University of Wisconsin). With Carolyn Leste Law, Dews edited Out in the South (Temple) and This Fine Place So Far From Home: Voices of Academics from the Working Class (Temple).
S. J. Rozan a native New Yorker, is the author of twelve novels. Her work has won numerous awards including the Edgar, Shamus, Anthony, Nero, and Macavity awards for Best Novel and the Edgar for Best Short Story.
Conor Fitzgerald has lived in Ireland, the UK, the United States and Italy. He has worked as an arts editor, produced a current affairs journal for foreign embassies based in Rome, and founded a successful translation company. He is married with two children and lives in Rome. The Namesake is the third in his series of Italian Crime novels.
Friday, 21 June 2013, 7:30p.m., Reading by Writer in Residence Jhumpa Lahiri.
Location: La Sala Grande in San Lorenzo in Miranda, Roman Forum.
Free ticket required .
Thursday, 20 June 2013, 7:30 p.m., "A Conversation with Jhumpa Lahiri", Writer in
Residence and announcement of the winners of Italy Writes.
Free ticket required .
Ms Lahiri received the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for Interpreter of Maladies, her debut story collection that explores issues of love and identity among immigrants and cultural transplants. Her novel The Namesake expands on the perplexities of the immigrant experience and the search for identity. This novel has been selected as the focus of John Cabot University's program 2013 Italy Reads.
Born in London, Lahiri moved to Rhode Island as a young child with her Bengali parents. Her abilities to convey cultural conflicts in the most immediate fashion and to achieve the voices of many different characters are among the unique qualities that have captured the attention of a wide audience.
Alongside the Pulitzer Prize, Jhumpa Lahiri also won the PEN/Hemingway Award, an O. Henry Prize (for the short story "Interpreter of Maladies"), the Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Vallombrosa Von Rezzori Prize and the Asian American Literary Award. Lahiri was also granted a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002 and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 2006.
Wednesday, 19 June 2013, 7:30 p.m., Student & Faculty Reading including the finalists of Italy Writes . Location: the Secchia Terrace, Guarini Campus
Monday, 17 June 2013, 7:30 p.m., Reading by Francesca Marciano
Francesca Marciano was born in Rome and lived in the US and in Kenya for many years. She is a film writer
and the author of three novels published in the US by Pantheon: "Rules of The Wild", a love story within the close-knit tribe of expats living in East Africa; "Casa Rossa", a family saga spanning thirty years set in a farmhouse in Puglia; "The End of Manners", a story about two women – a photographer and a war correspondent – travelling through
war-ravaged Afghanistan. Francesca has also written several film scripts, mostly
for Italian cinema. ("I am not scared" by G. Salvatores, "Io e te" by B. Bertolucci, and recently "Miele" by V. Golino among others) . She uses both Italian and English in her writing, although
when writing fiction, she writes in English. She is currently working on a new collection
of short stories due to be out in March 2014.
Thursday, 6 June 2013, 7:30 p.m., Reading by Maria Grazia Calandrone
Maria Grazia Calandrone is a poet, theatre writer, performer, writer and broadcaster of cultural programs
with Radio 3, literary critic for Poesia and for the newspaper Il Manifesto. Her books of poetry include Pietra di paragone ["Touchstone"] (Tracce, 1998) which was published as the winner of the New Writers
Award, 1997 La scimmia randagia ["The stray monkey"] (Crocetti, 2003 ) which received the Pasolini Award for the
Debut Work and Sulla bocca di tutti ["On everyone's lips"] (Crocetti, 2010) which received the Napoli, Sassari and Prata
Award. A series of her poems are in Nuovi poeti italiani 6 (Einaudi, 2012) and appear in anthologies and magazines of several European and American
countries, including John Cabot University's InVerse anthology of poetry (2008-2009). In 1993 she won the eleventh edition of the Montale
Award for unpublished works. Her poetry has been translated into: Czech, French, Japanese,
Greek, English, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Sirian, Spanish, Swedish, German
and Turkish. Maria Grazia lives in Rome.
Friday, 31 May 2013, 7:30 p.m., Reading by Elizabeth Geoghegan
Elizabeth Geoghegan earned an MFA in Writing from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago and an MA in Fiction from The University of Colorado at Boulder where her graduate thesis The Sound of Skin was selected for the Ruth Murray Underhill Award. Her writing has appeared in The Cream City Review, Bombay Gin, Nerve.com's Sex Advice From, and other publications. Her essay "Unholy Anguish: Teaching Flannery O'Connor in Rome" is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. A freelance stylist, she has worked with The Smashing Pumpkins, Christian Dior, People Magazine, and Vanity Fair, and in 2009 she produced the award-winning short film Benedizione delle Bestie. Geoghegan will read from her story collection The Book of Boys, which she is currently completing alongside an untitled novel.
Tuesday, 23 April 2013, 7:30 p.m., Andrea di Robilant
Andrea di Robilant is a journalist and writer who divides his time between Rome and Venice. Born and raised in Italy, he studied history and politics at Columbia University and spent many years in the United States as a correspondent for the Italian dailies La Repubblica and La Stampa. He is the author of three books of non-fiction. A Venetian Affair, a New York Times "notable book of the year", is an account of a clandestine love story set in eighteenth century Venice. Lucia: A Venetian Life in the Age of Napoleon is widely praised biography of the author's ancestor, Lucia Mocenigo. His third book, Irresistible North, published in the UK as Venetian Navigators, tells the story of Nicolò and Antonio Zen, two Venetian brothers who sailed to the North Atlantic at the end of the fourteenth century. He is currently at work on a a book about mapping the world in Renaissance Venice.
Sunday, 24 March 2013, 7:00-9:00 p.m., David Starkey
David Starkey will read from his new book, Circus Maximus, poems about Rome. Starkey is an accomplished poet who directs the creative writing program at Santa Barbara City College. Among his poetry collections are Starkey's Book of States (Boson Books, 2007), Adventures of the Minor Poet (Artamo Press, 2007), Ways of Being Dead: New and Selected Poems (Artamo, 2006), David Starkey's Greatest Hits (Pudding House, 2002) and Fear of Everything, winner of Palanquin Press's Spring 2000 chapbook contest. In addition, over the past twenty years he has published more than 400 poems in prestigious literary journals and he has also written two textbooks: Creative Writing: Four Genres in Brief (Bedford/St. Martin's, 2008) – which is regularly used at JCU - and Poetry Writing: Theme and Variations (McGraw-Hill, 1999).
Thursday, 29 November 2012, 7:30 p.m., Playwright John Guare
Award-winning playwright John Guare has been a longtime member of the Dramatists Guild
and was elected in 1989 to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
He is best known as the author of The House of Blue Leaves, Six Degrees of Separation,
and Landscape of the Body.
His style, which mixes comic invention with an acute sense of the failure of human relations and aspirations, is at once cruel and deeply compassionate.
Wednesday, 24 October 2012, 7:30 p.m. – 9:00 p.m., George Minot
George Minot will offer a reading from his new novel Om Love.The novel tells a moving, sensual, athletic (and aesthetic) story, set in the downtown New York yoga world at the turn of the millennium, a love story about a once-trendy artist who's lost his bearings and finds his life reinvigorated by his new yoga practice – and a certain barefooted yoga teacher.
Friday, 22 June 2012, 8:30 p.m., Joyce Carol Oates will give a reading at La Sala Grande in San Lorenzo in Miranda beside the Roman Forum (no charge, but reservation required).
Joyce Carol Oates published her first book in 1963 and has since published over fifty novels, as well as many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. Her novel Them (1969) won the National Book Award, and her novels Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), and Blonde (2000) were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Her many awards include the M.L. Rosenthal Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the O. Henry Award, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Art of the Short Story, the Prix Femina Étranger, and the National Humanities Medal. Since 2008, Oates has been the the Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor in the Humanities with the Program in Creative Writing at Princeton University, where she has taught since 1978.
Thursday, 21 June 2012, 8:30 p.m., "A Conversation with Joyce Carol Oates, Novelist in Residence" and announcement of the winners of Italy Writes. (no charge, but reservation required).
Wednesday, 20 June 2012, 8:30 p.m., Student & Faculty reading including the finalists of Italy Writes, Guarini Campus, Secchia Terrace (weather permitting; otherwise, Aula Magna Regina)
Tuesday, 19 June 2012, 8:30 p.m., Writer Peter Trachtenberg
Peter Trachtenberg is the author of 7 Tattoos and The Book of Calamities: Five Questions About Suffering and Its Meaning. His new book, Another Insane Devotion, will be published by Da Capo this fall. His essays, journalism, and stories have
appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, A Public Space, and The New York Times Travel Magazine. He is the recipient of a Whiting Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship and comes to
Cabot from a residency at the Bellagio Center. An Assistant Professor of English at
the University of Pittsburgh, Trachtenberg also sings with the band Gutter Glitter.
Monday, 18 June 2012, 8:30 p.m., Poets Johnny Horton & Rebecca Hoogs
Many people know John Wesley Horton as Johnny Horton. He's recently published poems in Poetry Northwest, Notre Dame Review, Malpais Review, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, and an anthology of Chicago poetry from U of Iowa Press called City of Big Shoulders. He also has work forthcoming from Ooligan Press at Portland State University in
an anthology of Northwest Poetry. His manuscript A New World Where We Could Stand to Live was a finalist in 2011 for the National Poetry Series. He's received a GAP grant
from Washington Artist Trust and residency fellowships from the Ragdale Foundation
and The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
Rebecca Hoogs is the author of a chapbook, Grenade (GreenTower Press), and her poems have appeared in journals such as Poetry, AGNI, Crazyhorse, Zyzzyva, The Journal, Poetry Northwest, The Florida Review, Cincinnati Review, and others. She won the 2011 Southeast Review poetry contest. She is the recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and Artist Trust of Washington State. She is the Director of Education Programs and the curator of the Poetry Series for Seattle Arts & Lectures, and the Co-Director of the Creative Writing in Rome program for the University of Washington.
Thursday, 14 June 2012, 8:30 p.m., Poet Cyrus Cassells
Cyrus Cassells's fifth and latest book is The Crossed-Out Swastika. His poetry has garnered a Lannan Literary Award, a Lambda Literary Award, the William
Carlos Williams Award, a Pushcart Prize, two NEA grants, and best of the year citations
from Publishers Weekly and Library Journal. Still Life with Children: Selected Poems of Francesc Parcerisas and My Gingerbread Shakespeare, his first work of fiction, are forthcoming. A Professor of English at Texas State
University-San Marcos, he divides his time between Austin, Santa Fe, and Paris.
Monday, 11 June 2012, 8:30 p.m., Poet Joseph Harrison
Joseph Harrison was born in Richmond, Virginia, grew up in Virginia and Alabama, and
studied at Yale and Johns Hopkins. His book Someone Else's Name (Waywiser, 2003) was named as one of five poetry books of the year by the Washington
Post. His second book of poems, Identity Theft, was published by Waywiser in 2008. His poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry 1998, 180 More Extraordinary Poems for Every Day, The Library of America's Anthology of American Religious Poems, the Penguin Pocket Anthology of Poetry, the Penguin Pocket Anthology of Literature, The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets, and many journals. In 2005 he was the recipient of an Academy Award in Literature
from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2009 he received a Fellowship in
Poetry from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He lives in Baltimore.
Billy Collins, United States Poet Laureate 2001- 2003 Billy Collins, who served two terms as Poet Laureate of the United States, is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry. His many prizes and accolades include Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation; the Poet of the Year Award from Poetry Magazine, the Mark Twain Award for Humor in Poetry, and the "Literary Lion" Award from the New York Public Library. A Distinguished Professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York, and the Senior Distinguished Fellow of the Winter Park Institute, Florida, Collins also served as the New York State Poet from 2004-2006. He has been called "the most popular poet in America" in The New York Times, and his similarly popular poetry anthologies have served to broaden the audience for poetry in the United States.
Thursday 7 June 2012, 8:30 p.m., Billy Collins will give a poetry reading at La Sala Grande in San Lorenzo in Miranda beside the Roman Forum (no charge, but reservation required).
Tuesday, 5 June 2012, 8:30 p.m., "A Conversation with Billy Collins, Poet in Residence" (no charge, but reservation required).
Monday, 4 June 2012, 8:30 p.m., Poets Chad Davidson and John Poch
Chad Davidson is the author of The Last Predicta (2008) and Consolation Miracle (2003), both on Southern Illinois UP, as well as co-author with Gregory Fraser of Writing Poetry: Creative and Critical Approaches (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). He is an associate professor of literature and creative writing at the University of West Georgia near Atlanta and director of the university's new study abroad program in Italy.
John Poch is the author of three books of poems, most recently Dolls (Orchises Press 2009). He has published poems in Poetry, Paris Review, The Nation, Yale Review, Agni, and other journals. He teaches in the creative writing program at Texas Tech University. He is an editor of the new anthology of poems, Old Flame, due out this summer from WordFarm Press.
Wednesday, 23 May 2012, 8:30 p.m., Poet Robert Hass
JCU Kicks Off the Summer Institute for Creative Writing and Literary Translation with a Bi-Lingual Reading of Poems by Former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass.
Robert Hass, U.S. Poet Laureate from 1995-97, has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and – twice – the National Book Critics Circle Award, once in poetry and once in criticism. Recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, Mr. Hass is the author of seven books of poetry, as well as several works of literary criticism. He has also published numerous volumes in translation, and is widely known as the leading translator of the poems of Polish Nobel Laureate, Czeslaw Milosz. A reception will follow.
Wednesday, 4 April, 2012, 8:30pm
Aula Magna Regina
A Reading by Nahid Rachlin
Nahid Rachlin attended Columbia University's MFA program on a Doubleday-Columbia Fellowship, and then went on to Stanford University's MFA program as a Stegner Fellow. Her publications include a memoir, Persian Girls (Penguin); four novels, Jumping Over Fire (City Lights), Foreigner (W.W. Norton), Married to a Stranger (E. P. Dutton-City Lights), and The Heart's Desire (City Lights); as well as a collection of short stories, Veils (City Lights). Her individual short stories have appeared in more than fifty magazines including The Virginia Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, Redbook, and Shenandoah. One of her stories was adopted by Symphony Space for its "Selected Shorts" series and was read at the Getty Museum, LA; it aired on NPR stations around the U.S.
Rachlin's work has received favorable reviews in major magazines and newspapers, and has been translated into Portuguese, Polish, Dutch, Arabic, and Persian. She has written reviews and essays for the New York Times, Newsday, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. She is the recipient of many grants and awards, including the Bennett Cerf Award, PEN Syndicated Fiction Project Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts grant.
Wednesday, 7 March, 2012, 8:30pm
Aula Magna Regina
The Shoulders on which Barack Obama Stands: An Evening with Gail Milissa Grant
Gail Milissa Grant was born in St. Louis at the cusp of the civil rights movement of the 1950s. She is the daughter of Mildred and David M. Grant, a prominent civil rights attorney and activist. Grant received her B.A. in Art History and Archaeology from Washington University in St. Louis, and later earned an M.A. in Art History from Howard University in Washington D.C., where she later become an assistant professor of art and architectural history.
She served as a Foreign Service Officer with the U.S. Information Agency and U.S. State Department for more than 20 years. As a diplomat, she directed international public relations and cultural exchange programs overseas and from the U.S., and recruited and led culturally diverse teams toward that end. During her tenure, she was assigned to Norway, France, and Brazil, and did extensive press advance work on four continents for three U.S. presidents.
Currently, she is a writer and public speaker based in Rome, Italy. Her first book, At the Elbows of My Elders: One Family's Journey Toward Civil Rights (Missouri History Museum), won the Benjamin Franklin Book of the Year 2009 in the autobiography/memoir category and received an Award of Merit from the American Association for State and Local History.
Wednesday, 25 January, 2012, 8:30pm
Aula Magna Regina
A Reading from the Vernacular Sonnets of Giuseppe Gioachino Belli (Vol. 1 1819-1832)
With readings in the original Romanesco dialect by Franco Onorati of the Centro Studi G.G. Belli, and introductory remarks by Professor Eugenio Ragni, also of the Centro Studi G.G. Belli, and renowned translator Riccardo Duranti.
Michael Sullivan was born in Dukinfield, England. He has taught English in various Italian cities (Palermo, Sulmona), Philosophy at London University, and Italian History in Rome. He was led into translation by his collaboration with Professor Enrico Macchi on the Harrap-Sansone Italian-English dictionary (editio princeps, vol. 2°.) His translations include Althenopis by Fabrizia Ramondino (Carcanet); Idea of Prose by Giorgio Agamben (SUNY);The Love Sonnets of Michelangelo (Peter Owen); The Last Writings by Armando Petrucci (Stanford); and The Resurrection of Jesus Christ by Heinrich Schlier (30Days). The author of a novel, Gossip, and various plays for the BBC, he is an associate of the Centro Studi Belli (Roma) and current president of the Collegio Italiano dei Traduttori Letterari Europei (Procida). This will be a bi-lingual reading of Belli's sonnets in the original Romanesco dialect and in English.
Tuesday, 31 January, 2012, 8:30pm
Aula Magna Regina
Poetry Reading by Jorge Esquinca
Jorge Esquinca was born in Mexico City. He has worked as an editor, translator and cultural promoter. He has published half a dozen books of poetry in Mexico, as well as translations of books by Pierre Reverdy, W.S. Merwin (his translation of The Compass Rose was awarded the National Prize for Poetry in Translation), Henri Michaux, André du Bouchet and H.D. Esquinca has been awarded grants from the Ministry of Culture of France and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy. He is a member of the National System of Art Creators. His recent book, Descripción de un brillo azul cobalto was awarded the prestigious Jaime Sabines Ibero-American Prize, 2009. This will be a tri-lingual reading, featuring Esquinca's works in the original Spanish, as well as translations into English and Italian.
Monday, 7 November, 2011, 8pm
Aula Magna Regina
Reading by Kim Addonizio
Kim Addonizio is the author of five collections of poetry including Tell Me, a 2000 National Book Award Finalist. Her work has received a Guggenheim Fellowship,
two NEA Fellowships, the John Ciardi Lifetime Achievement Award, and other honors.
She has published two instructional books: Ordinary Genius, A Guide for the Poet Within; and The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry (with Dorianne Laux). She has a word/music CD with Susan Browne, "Swearing, Smoking,
Drinking & Kissing," available from CD Baby.
Addonizio's other books include two novels, Little Beauties and My Dreams Out in the Street; and a book of stories, In the Box Called Pleasure. With Cheryl Dumesnil, she co-edited Dorothy Parker's Elbow: Tattoos on Writers, Writers on Tattoos.
3 August, 2011, 8:00pm
Guarini Campus
Reading by Kimberly Johnson
Kimberly Johnson is the author of two collections of poetry, Leviathan with a Hook and A Metaphorical God, and of a translation of Virgil's Georgics. Her poetry, translations, and scholarly essays have appeared widely in publications including The New Yorker, Slate, The Iowa Review, and Modern Philology. With Michael C. Schoenfeldt and Richard Strier, Johnson has edited a collection of essays on Renaissance literature, and she has served as the editor for a fully-searchable online collection of John Donne's complete sermons. Recipient of grants and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Utah Arts Council, and the Mellon Foundation, Johnson holds an M.A. from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and a Ph.D. in Renaissance Literature from the University of California at Berkeley. Kimberly Johnson lives in Salt Lake City, Utah. (Source:www.kimberly-johnson.com).
22 June 2011, Wednesday, 8:00 p.m., Reading by Institute Students and Faculty
Secchia Terrace, John Cabot University, Guarini Campus, Via della Lungara 233.
21 June 2011, Tuesday, 8:00 p.m., Readings by Rick Kenney and Kevin Craft, University
of Washington
Aula Magna Regina, John Cabot University, Guarini Campus, Via della Lungara 233.
Richard Kenney is the author of four books of poetry, The Evolution of the Flightless Bird (Yale, 1984), Orrery (Atheneum, 1985), The Invention of the Zero (Knopf, 1993), and The One-Strand River (Knopf, 2007). His work has been published widely in literary journals, and has attracted many honors, among them the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, the Rome Prize, a Lannan Literary Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Washington, and for some years has directed and participated in their summer seminar at the Palazzo Pio, in Rome.
Kevin Craft lives in Seattle and directs the Written Arts Program at Everett Community College. He also co-directs the University of Washington's Creative Writing Summer in Rome Program. His books include Solar Prominence (2005), a collection of poems which won the Gorsline Prize from Cloudbank Books, as well as four editions of the anthology Mare Nostrum, writing inspired by Mediterranean history and culture. Craft has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Bogliasco Foundation (Italy), the Carmargo Foundation (France), and the Washington State Arts Commission/Artist Trust. He is the editor of Poetry Northwest.
20 June 2011, Monday, 8:00 p.m., Reading by Heather McGowan and Jay Hopler, American
Academy in Rome, Rome Prize Winners
Aula Magna Regina, John Cabot University, Guarini Campus, Via della Lungara 233.
Heather McGowan currently holds the John Guare Writer's Fund Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome. She is the author of the novel Schooling (Doubleday/Faber UK), which was a Newsweek, Detroit Free Press and Hartford Courant Best Book of the Year and included in the volume 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, edited by Peter Boxall. Her second novel Duchess of Nothing (Bloomsbury/Faber UK) was published in 2006. Montrachet, a limited edition collaboration with visual artist Liam Gillick also appeared in 2006. Tadpole, her original screenplay, was directed by Gary Winick and starred Sigourney Weaver. The film won Best Director at Sundance in 2002 and was subsequently released by Miramax. She has taught at Columbia University and The Screenwriting Colony in Nantucket. Fellowships include the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony.
Jay Hopler was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1970 and he has earned degrees from Purdue University (Ph.D., American Studies), The Iowa Writers' Workshop (M.F.A., Creative Writing/Poetry), The Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars (M.A., Creative Writing/Poetry) and New York University (B.A., English and American Literature). His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in numerous magazines and journals including American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker and Slate. His book of poems, Green Squall (Yale University Press, 2006) was chosen by Louise Glück as the winner of the 2005 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. Green Squall also received the 2007 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, a 2006 Florida Book Award [Silver Medal in the Poetry Category], a 2006 ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award [Bronze Medal in the Poetry Category] and a 2007 National "Best Books" Award from USA Book News. He also has been the recipient of a Marfa Residency Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation, a Whiting Writers' Award from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation and a Rome Fellowship in Literature (The Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize, a Gift from the Drue Heinz Trust) from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy in Rome.The Killing Spirit: An Anthology of Murder-for-Hire, his first book, was published in the United States and Europe by The Overlook Press and Canongate Books in 1996. He lives in Tampa and is Assistant Professor of English (Creative Writing/Poetry) at the University of South Florida.
15 June 2011, Wednesday, 8:00 p.m., Conversation with Dorothy Allison, Novelist in
Residence
Aula Magna Regina, John Cabot University, Guarini Campus, Via della Lungara 233.
13 June 2011, Monday, 8:00 p.m., Reading by Dorothy Allison, Novelist in Residence
Aula Magna Regina, John Cabot University, Guarini Campus, Via della Lungara 233.
Dorothy Allison grew up in Greenville, South Carolina, the first child of a fifteen-year-old unwed mother who worked as a waitress. Now living in Northern California with her partner Alix and her teenage son, Wolf Michael, she describes herself as a feminist, a working class story teller, a Southern expatriate, a sometime poet and a happily born-again Californian. The first member of her family to graduate from high school, Allison attended Florida Presbyterian college on a National Merit Scholarship and studied anthropology at the New School for Social Research. An award winning editor for Quest, Conditions, and Outlook—early feminist and Lesbian & Gay journals, Allison's chapbook of poetry,The Women Who Hate Me, was published with Long Haul Press in 1983. Her short story collection, Trash (1988) was published by Firebrand Books. Trash won two Lambda Literary Awards and the American Library Association Prize for Lesbian and Gay Writing. Allison says that the early Feminist movement changed her life. "It was like opening your eyes under water. It hurt, but suddenly everything that had been dark and mysterious became visible and open to change." However, she admits, she would never have begun to publish her stories if she hadn't gotten over her prejudices, and started talking to her mother and sisters again. Allison received mainstream recognition with her novel Bastard Out of Carolina, (1992) a finalist for the 1992 National Book Award. The novel won the Ferro Grumley prize, an ALA Award for Lesbian and Gay Writing, became a best seller, and an award-winning movie. It has been translated into more than a dozen languages. Cavedweller (1998) became a national bestseller, NY Times Notable book of the year, finalist for the Lillian Smith prize, and an ALA prize winner. Adapted for the stage by Kate Moira Ryan, the play was directed by Michael Greif, and featured music by Hedwig composer, Stephen Trask. In 2003, Lisa Cholendenko directed a movie version featuring Krya Sedwick. The expanded edition of Trash (2002) included the prize winning short story, "Compassion" selected for both Best American Short Stories 2003 and Best New Stories from the South 2003.
7 June 2011, Tuesday, 8:00 p.m., Reading by Phillip Lopate
Aula Magna Regina, John Cabot University, Guarini Campus, Via della Lungara 233.
Phillip Lopate was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1943, and received a BA from Columbia in 1964, and a doctorate from the Union Graduate School in 1979. He has written three personal essay collections --Bachelorhood (Little, Brown, 1981), Against Joie de Vivre (Poseidon-Simon & Schuster, 1989), and Portrait of My Body (Doubleday-Anchor, 1996); two novels, Confessions of Summer (Doubleday, 1979) and The Rug Merchant (Viking, 1987); two poetry collections, The Eyes Don't Always Want to Stay Open(Sun Press, 1972) and The Daily Round (Sun Press, 1976); a memoir of his teaching experiences, Being With Children (Doubleday, 1975); a collection of his movie criticism, Totally Tenderly Tragically(Doubleday-Anchor); an urbanist meditation, Waterfront: A Journey Around Manhattan (Crown, 2004); and a biographical monograph, Rudy Burckhardt: Photographer and Filmmaker (Harry N. Abrams, 2004.) In addition, there is a Phillip Lopate reader, Getting Personal: Selected Writings (Basic Books, 2003). He has been awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Public Library Center for Scholars and Writers Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts grants, and two New York Foundation for the Arts grants. He received a Christopher medal for Being With Children, a Texas Institute of Letters award in the best non-fiction book of the year category for Bachelorhood, and was a finalist for the PEN best essay book of the year award for Portrait of My Body. His anthology, Writing New York, received a citation from the New York Society Library and honorable mention from the Municipal Art Society's Brendan Gill Award. After working with children for twelve years as a writer in the schools, he taught creative writing and literature at Fordham, Cooper Union, University of Houston, and New York University. He is a professor at Columbia University, where he directs the MFA nonfiction concentration, and also teaches in the MFA programs of Bennington and the New School.
1 June 2011, Wednesday, 800 p.m., Conversation with Marilyn Hacker, Poet in Residence
Aula Magna Regina, John Cabot University, Guarini Campus, Via della Lungara 233.
30 May 2011, Monday, 8:00 p.m., Reading by Marilyn Hacker, Poet in Residence
Aula Magna Regina, John Cabot University, Guarini Campus, Via della Lungara 233.
Marilyn Hacker is the author of twelve collections of poems, a book of critical essays, and eleven
collections of poetry translated from the French. Her most recent books are Names (W. W. Norton, 2009), Essays on Departure, (Carcanet Press, U.K. 2006) and Desesperanto (W.W.Norton, 2003), and the essay collection Unauthorized Voices (University of Michigan Press, 2010).
Hacker's first collection of poems, Presentation Piece, was published by the Viking Press in 1974. It was both the Lamont Poetry Selection
of the Academy of American Poets and the recipient of the National Book Award. It
was followed by Separations (Alfred A. Knopf, 197) and Taking Notice (Knopf, 1980) and Assumptions (Knopf, 1985). In 1986, Hacker published Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons(Arbor House), a novel-like narrative of a lesbian relationship told through sonnets.
In 1990, she published Going Back to the River (Vintage Books), for which she received a Lambda Literary Award. Hacker's 199 collection, Winter Numbers (W. W. Norton and Company), details the loss of friends to AIDS and cancer, and explores
her own struggle with breast cancer. The collection won both the Lenore Marshall Poetry
Prize and a Lambda Literary Award. Her Selected Poems: 1965-1990 received the 1996
Poets' Prize. Her next book, Squares and Courtyards (Norton, 2001) received the Audre Lorde Award of the Publishing Triangle.
Marilyn Hacker was editor of the feminist literary magazine 13th Moon in the 1980s,
and was editor of the literary quarterly The Kenyon Review from 1990 through 1994. She is currently co-editor of the University of Michigan Poets on Poetry Series, and on the editorial board of the French literary magazine Siècle 21.
Hacker began publishing translations in 1996 with Claire Malroux's Edge (Wake Forest University Press). Other French and Francophone poets she has translated
include Guy Goffette, Vénus Khoury-Ghata and Hédi Kaddour. She received the 2009 PEN
Award for Poetry in Translation for Marie Etienne's King of a Hundred Horsemen (Farrar Strauss and Giroux).
Marilyn Hacker currently lives in Paris. She was elected a Chancellor of the Academy
of American Poets in 2008. She received the PEN Voelcker Award for the totality of
her own work in 2010.
24 May 2011, Tuesday, 8:00 p.m., Reading by Joseph Harrison
Aula Magna Regina, John Cabot University, Guarini Campus, Via della Lungara 233.
Joseph Harrison was born in Richmond, Virginia, grew up in Virginia and Alabama, and studied at Yale and Johns Hopkins. His book Someone Else's Name (Waywiser, 2003) was named as one of five poetry books of the year by the Washington Post. His second book of poems, Identity Theft, was published by Waywiser in 2008. His poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry 1998, 180 More Extraordinary Poems for Every Day, The Library of America's Anthology of American Religious Poems, the Penguin Pocket Anthology of Poetry, the Penguin Pocket Anthology of Literature, The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets, and many journals. In 2005 he was the recipient of an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2009 he received a Fellowship in Poetry from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He lives in Baltimore.
11 April 2011, Monday, 8:00 p.m., Poetry Reading by David Starkey
Aula Magna Regina, John Cabot University, Guarini Campus, Via della Lungara 233.
David Starkey directs the Creative Writing Program at Santa Barbara City College. Among his poetry collections are Starkey's Book of States (Boson Books, 2007), Adventures of the Minor Poet (Artamo Press, 2007), Ways of Being Dead: New and Selected Poems (Artamo, 2006), David Starkey's Greatest Hits (Pudding House, 2002) and Fear of Everything, winner of Palanquin Press's Spring 2000 chapbook contest. A Few Things You Should Know about the Weasel will be published by the Canadian press Biblioasis next year. In addition, over the past twenty years he has published more than 400 poems in a wide range of literary journals and written two textbooks: Creative Writing: Four Genres in Brief (Bedford/St. Martin's, 2008) and Poetry Writing: Theme and Variations (McGraw-Hill, 1999). With Paul Willis, he co-edited In a Fine Frenzy: Poets Respond to Shakespeare (Iowa, 2005), and he is the editor of Living Blue in the Red States (Nebraska, 2007). Keywords in Creative Writing, which he co-authored with the late Wendy Bishop, was published in 2006 by Utah State University Press.
17 March 2011, Thursday, 7:00 p.m., A Tribute to Brodsky
Aula Magna Regina, John Cabot University, Guarini Campus, Via della Lungara 233.
"John Cabot University is honored to host such an exceptional literary event," said JCU President Franco Pavoncello last night as he welcomed guests who were overflowing in the Aula Magna Regina for the first day of "A Tribute to Joseph Brodsky, "thirty years after the Russian exile and Nobel Laureate poet (1940-1996) was a Resident at the American Academy in Rome in 1981.
Six international writers—Roberto Calasso (Italy), Boris Khersonsky (Russia), Mary Jo Salter and Mark Strand (USA), Derek Walcott (St. Lucia) and Adam Zagajewski (Poland) gathered to read from their own work in honor of Brodsky.
Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott , former U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Mark Strand, and award-winning poet Mary Jo Salter all read poems in honor of Brodsky or dedicated to him as well as additional poems of their own; Roberto Calasso presented a new memoir, "Speaking with Brodsky;" Adam Zagajewski and Boris Khersonsky, who was a Fellow at the AAR under the auspices of the Joseph Brodsky Memorial Fellowship Fund, also presented their work.
The event was organized by the American Academy in Rome in collaboration with the Joseph Brodsky Memorial Fellowship Fund, John Cabot University, the Casa delle Letterature/Comune di Roma, and the University of Rome "La Sapienza".
"It was a tremendous pleasure to work with the American Academy in Rome to host an event featuring such world-renowned poets to honor the life and work of Joseph Brodsky," commented Professor Carlos Dews, Chair of JCU's Department of English Language and Literature and Director of the Institute for Creative Writing and Literary Translation.
The two-day program was made possible by the generous support of AAR Trustee Nancy M. O'Boyle, the Embassy of the United States of America in Rome, and the Joseph Brodsky Memorial Fellowship Fund.
On Friday 18 March in the Sala Aurelia of the AAR's Villa Aurelia, Tribute participants presented a selection of Brodsky's poems in English, Italian, and Russian (with an accompanying PowerPoint projection of translations and original texts), followed by a conversation about the poet's life and work.
9 November 2010, Tuesday, 6:00 p.m., Reading by American novelist Michael Mewshaw.
Michael Mewshaw is the former director of the creative writing program at the University of Texas-Austin.
He is the author of 18 books including "Ladies of the Court: Grace and Disgrace of the Women's Tennis Circuit" (1993) and "Short Circuit: Six Months on the Men's Professional Tennis Tour" (1983).
25 October 2010, Monday, 7:00 p.m., Reading by American poet Moira Egan. "Women Reading: A Series of Bi-lingual Presentations of Poetry and Prose."
Moira Egan's poetry collections are Cleave (WWPH, 2004); La Seta della Cravatta/The Silk of the Tie (Edizioni l'Obliquo, 2009); Bar Napkin Sonnets (The Ledge, 2009); and Spin (Entasis Press, 2010). Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Best American Poetry 2008, and in translation in Nuovi Argomenti and Lo Straniero. With Damiano Abeni, she has published books in translation by John Barth, Mark Strand, Josephine Tey, and John Ashbery, whose collection, Un mondo che non può essere migliore: Poesie scelte 1956-2007, won a Special Prize of the Premio Napoli (2009). She teaches English and Creative Writing at John Cabot University.
18 October 2010, Monday, 6:30 p.m., Reading by Italian poet Antonella Anedda. Part of "Women Reading: A Series of Bi-lingual Presentations of Poetry and Prose."
Antonella Anedda teaches in the Masters program of the University of Lugano (Switzerland). Her books include Residenze Invernali (1992), Il Catalogo della Gioia (2003), and Notti di Pace Occidentale (1999), which was awarded the Premio Montale. She has also published volumes of translations and three collections of prose. Her latest poetry collection, Dal Balcone del Corpo (2007) was awarded the Dedalus Prize and the Napoli Prize for Book of the Year. Her recent book of ekphrastic prose, La Vita dei Dettagli, was published in 2009. She has also contributed to Poesia and Nuovi Argomenti.
14 October 2010, Thursday, 6:30 p.m., Reading by Italian novelist Dacia Maraini. Part of "Women Reading: A Series of Bi-lingual Presentations of Poetry and Prose."
Dacia Maraini is one of the best known of contemporary Italian writers. Her works have been widely translated and published in many languages, and her renown is also due to her fine talent as a critic, poet and playwright. When she was 19, she moved to Rome where she met Alberto Moravia and published her first novel, La Vacanza. This novel was followed by many other successful works, which received numerous literary awards, including the Premio Campiello and the Premio Strega. Maraini is the author of more than sixty plays performed in Italy and abroad, her works have been translated into 22 languages. In 1973, she founded the Teatro della Maddalena, managed exclusively by women.
6 October 2010, Wednesday, 7:00 p.m., Reading by Italian novelist and short story writer Chiara Valerio. Part of "Women Reading: A Series of Bi-lingual Presentations of Poetry and Prose."
Chiara Valerio writes for Nuovi Argomenti and Nazione Indiana. She has published a collection of short stories, A complicare le cose (2003), which was awarded the Carver Prize, and the novels Fermati un minuto a salutare (2006) and Ognuno sta solo (2007). Most recently, she has published (with nottetempo) Nessuna scuola mi consola (2009) and La gioia piccola d'esser quasi salvi (2009) and (with Laterza) Spiaggia libera tutti (2010).
5 October 2010, Tuesday, 6:00 p.m., Reading and lecture by British biographer Alexandra Richardson.
Alexandra Richardson was born in New York and has lived much of her adult life in Italy. She has worked in Bangkok for USIA, in New York for Newsweek Magazine, and in Milan for Selezione dal Reader's Digest. Since marriage, she has been a freelance feature writer and columnist for various Italian, American and English periodicals. She has collaborated on books with James Michener and Lawrence Elliott and contributed the entire Italian section of A Dictionary of Foreign Quotations, edited by Anthony Lejeune and published by Stacey International. Passionate Patron: The Life of Alexander Hardcastle is her own first book.
23 September 2010, Thursday, 7:30 p.m., Reading by South African poet Ingrid de Kok. Part of "Women Reading: A Series of Bi-lingual Presentations of Poetry and Prose."
Ingrid de Kok is an internationally known South African poet who works at the Centre for Extra-Mural Studies at the University of Cape Town. She is the author of several volumes of poetry, including Seasonal Fires: New and Selected Poems. This bi-lingual reading will also feature Italian versions of de Kok's work from Mappe del corpo (Donzelli Editore), presented by the translator, Professor Paola Splendore of the University of Rome. South African novelist Gillian Slovo has said that Ms. de Kok's is a lyrical voice that has the capacity to ambush.
24 June 2010, Thursday, 8:00 p.m., Reading by Institute students and faculty
Aula Magna, John Cabot University, Guarini Campus, Via della Lungara 233.
23 June 2010, Wednesday, 8:00 p.m., Reading by Brad Leithauser and Mary Jo Salter
Aula Magna, John Cabot University, Guarini Campus, Via della Lungara 233.
Mary Jo Salter is the author of five collections of poems that have won such accolades as the New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She is a coeditor of The Norton Anthology of Poetry and a lyricist who has worked with composers Allen Bonde and Fred Hersch. She is also an essayist and reviewer for such publications as The New York Times Book Review and The Yale Review. She has received many awards, including NEA and Guggenheim fellowships.
Brad Leithauser was born in Detroit and graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School. He is the author of five novels, a novel in verse, four previous volumes of poetry, a collection of light verse, and a book of essays. Among his many awards and honors are a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Ingram Merrill Grant, and a MacArthur Fellowship. In 2005, the president of Iceland inducted him into the Order of the Falcon for his writings about Nordic literature. Leithauser and his wife, the poet Mary Jo Salter, are members of the faculty of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.
22 June 2010, Tuesday, 8:00 p.m., Reading by Peter Campion
Aula Magna, John Cabot University, Guarini Campus, Via della Lungara 233.
Peter Campion is the author of two collections of poetry, Other People (2005) and The Lions (2009,) both from the University of Chicago Press. He also published a monograph on the painter Mitchell Johnson in 2004, with Terrence Rogers Fine Art. His poems and prose have appeared recently in AGNI, ArtNews, The Boston Globe, Modern Painters, The New York Times, Poetry, The New Republic, Slate, and The Yale Review. He has received a George Starbuck Lectureship at Boston University, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and Jones Lectureship at Stanford University, a Pushcart Prize, and a Civitella Ranieri Individual Artist's Fellowship. He is currently the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. He is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Auburn University. He edits the journal Literary Imagination, which is published by Oxford University Press.
21 June 2010, Monday, 8:00 p.m., Reading by George Minot
Aula Magna, John Cabot University, Guarini Campus,Via della Lungara 233.
George Minot was born and raised in a large family in Massachusetts, lived in New York most of his adult life, and now lives in Rome. He is the author of a novel, The Blue Bowl (Knopf), and the forthcoming OmGirl. In addition to fiction, he writes non-fiction, works as an environmental communications consultant (writing and editing), and teaches yoga and healing with whole foods. He has a four year-old son, Milo Minot - who is also his uncompromising Italian language teacher.
15 June 2010, Tuesday, 8:00 p.m., Reading by Massimo Gezzi
Aula Magna, John Cabot University, Guarini Campus, Via della Lungara 233.
Massimo Gezzi was born in 1976 in Sant'Elpidio a Mare (FM). In 2002 he received his laurea in Modern Literature from the University of Bologna, with an International Montale Prize-winning dissertation about the poet Bartolo Cattafi. He is a contributing editor for Atelier, Poesia and Nuovi Argomenti. He has published two collections of poetry: Il mare a destra (Edizioni Atelier 2004) and L'attimo dopo (Luca Sossella Editore). He has been an Italian Fellow for the Arts of the American Academy in Rome. After living and working for some years in Pavia and Rome, he's currently working as an assistant at the Italian Institute of the University of Bern Switzerland). He lives between his native town and Switzerland.
14 June 2010, Monday, 8:00 p.m., Michael Reynolds/Europa Editions Panel Discussion
on the American Book Market and Books in Translation
Aula Magna, John Cabot University, Guarini Campus, Via della Lungara 233.
9 June 2010, Wednesday, 8:00 p.m., Reading by Simon Mawer
Aula Magna, John Cabot University, Guarini Campus, Via della Lungara 233.
8 June 2010, Tuesday, 8:00 p.m., Craft Workshop by Simon Mawer
Aula Magna, John Cabot University, Guarini Campus, Via della Lungara 233.
Simon Mawer is the author of The Glass Room, 2009 Man Booker Prize Short-listed Novel and the 2011 JCU Novelist in Residence for the Summer Institute for Creative Writing and Literary Translation.
7 June 2010, Monday, 8:00 p.m., Reading by Joseph Harrison
Aula Magna, John Cabot University, Guarini Campus, Via della Lungara 233.
Joseph Harrison was born in Richmond, Virginia, grew up in Virginia and Alabama, and studied at Yale and Johns Hopkins. His book Someone Else's Name (Waywiser, 2003) was named as one of five poetry books of the year by the Washington Post. His second book of poems, Identity Theft, was published by Waywiser in 2008. His poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry 1998, 180 More Extraordinary Poems for Every Day, The Library of America's Anthology of American Religious Poems, the Penguin Pocket Anthology of Poetry, the Penguin Pocket Anthology of Literature, The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets, and many journals. In 2005 he was the recipient of an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2009 he received a Fellowship in Poetry from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He lives in Baltimore.
2 June, Wednesday, 8:00 p.m., Reading by Mark Strand
Aula Magna, John Cabot University, Guarini Campus, Via della Lungara 233.
1 June, Tuesday, 8:00 p.m., Craft Workshop by Mark Strand
Aula Magna, John Cabot University, Guarini Campus, Via della Lungara 233.
Mark Strand is a Pulitzer Prize Winner, Former U.S. Poet Laureate, and Recipient of the Gold Medal in Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
26 May 2010, Wednesday, 8:00 p.m., Reading by Eliza Griswold
Aula Magna, John Cabot University, Guarini Campus, Via della Lungara 233.
Eliza Griswold's poems and reportage have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, among many others. She is a fellow at the New America Foundation and at the American Academy in Rome. Her first book of poems, Wideawake Field (FSG), was published in 2007. Her first non-fiction book, The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the fault line between Christianity and Islam will be published by FSG in the fall of 2010.
25 May 2010, Tuesday, 8:00 p.m., Reading by Richard Kenney
Aula Magna, John Cabot University, Guarini Campus, Via della Lungara 233.
Richard Kenney was born in Glens Falls, New York in 1948. In 1970 he won a Reynolds Fellowship to study Celtic lore in Ireland, Scotland and Wales. His works have been published in many magazines and journals, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly and The American Scholar. He has been a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellow, a John and Catherine MacArthur Foundation fellow and a Bogliasco Foundation fellow. In 1994, he was awarded the Lannan Literary Award. He currently teaches in the English department at the University of Washington and lives with his family in Port Townsend, Washington. He is the author of four books of poetry: The Evolution of the Flightless Bird (which was awarded the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize), Orrery, The Invention of the Zero, and The One-Strand River.
24 May 2010, Monday, 8:00 p.m., Reading by Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi
Aula Magna, John Cabot University, Guarini Campus, Via della Lungara 233.
Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi's debut novel, The Last Song of Dusk, won the Betty Trask Award in the UK, the Premio Grinzane Cavour in Italy, and was nominated for the IMPAC Prize in Ireland. Translated into 12 languages, The Last Song of Dusk was an international bestseller. Shanghvi has been voted: India Today's 50 Most Powerful Young Indians; Times of India's 10 Global Indians; Hindustan Times: 10 Most Creative Men; Sunday Times UK: The Next Big Thing; New Statesmen UK: India's Ten Bright Lights; Elle Magazine's 50 Most Stylish People; La Stampa, Italy: World's 10 Best Dressed Men. Shanghvi's new novel, The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay, nominated for the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize, has just been published in Italy, and will be published in America in September this year.