An award-winning group of writers is coming to Butler University this fall as part of the Vivian S. Delbrook Visiting Writers Series.
The events begin with National Book Award-winning poet Nikky Finney on September 14, followed by prose writer Joyce Carol Oates (September 28), poets Gerald Stern and Anne Marie Macari (October 6), novelist Laila Lalami (October 13), novelist Denis Johnson (November 11), and poet Dean Young (November 17).
Oates, Stern, Lalami, and Young have been Pulitzer Prize finalists. Finney, Macari, and Johnson are National Book Award winners.
All events in the series are free and open to the public without tickets. Both of the September readings are part of Butler’s Writer’s Harvest. Please support us in the fight against hunger by bringing a donation of dried pasta or rice to the Finney and Oats readings to support Second Helpings. In addition to accepting donations at the readings, we will have collection boxes at the Efroymson Center for Creative Writing and the English Department, JH308, for the entire month of September.
For more information, call 317-940-9861.
Nikky Finney
Monday, September 14, 7:30 p.m.
Clowes Memorial Hall, Krannert Room
Writer’s Harvest- This reading is part of Butler’s Writer’s Harvest. Please support us in the fight against hunger by bringing a donation of dried pasta or rice to support Second Helpings.
Nikky Finney has authored four books of poetry: Head Off & Split (2011); The World Is Round (2003); Rice (1995); and On Wings Made of Gauze (1985). The John H. Bennett Jr. Chair in Southern Letters and Literature at the University of South Carolina, Finney also authored Heartwood (1997), a collection of four interrelated stories. She edited The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South (2007), and co-founded the Affrilachian Poets. Finney’s fourth book of poetry, Head Off & Split, was awarded the 2011 National Book Award for poetry.
Joyce Carol Oates
Monday, September 28, 7:30 p.m.
Clowes Memorial Hall
Writer’s Harvest- This reading is part of Butler’s Writer’s Harvest. Please support us in the fight against hunger by bringing a donation of dried pasta or rice to support Second Helpings.
Over the decades, Joyce Carol Oates has established herself as a highly prolific scribe, who has written dozens of books including novels, short story collections, young adult fiction, plays, poetry, and essays. Her first published book, the 1963 story collection By the North Gate, was followed by her debut novel, With Shuddering Fall, in 1964.
Other notable works among many include National Book Award winner, Them (1969), a layered chronicling of urban life that was part of Oates’ Wonderland Quartet series, and her 26th novel, We Were the Mulvaneys (1996), an Oprah Winfrey Book Club selection about an unraveling family. The novels The Falls (2004) and The Gravedigger’s Daughter (2007) were both New York Times bestsellers. 2012’s Patricide was published as an e-book novella. Oates has also written suspense novels under the pseudonyms Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly.
Inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1978, Oates has won scores of awards over the course of her career, including the Prix Femina Etranger and the Pushcart Prize. Her story collection Lovely, Dark, Deep—tales told from many rungs of the social ladder and distinguished by their intelligence, language, and technique—was a Pulitzer Prize finalist this year.
Gerald Stern and Anne Marie Macari
Tuesday, October 6, 7:30 pm
Howard L. Schrott Center for the Arts
Gerald Stern’s books of poetry include Divine Nothingness: Poems (W. W. Norton, 2014); In Beauty Bright: Poems (W. W. Norton, 2012); Early Collected Poems: 1965–1992 (W. W. Norton, 2010); Save the Last Dance: Poems (2008); Everything Is Burning (2005); American Sonnets (2002); Last Blue: Poems (2000); This Time: New and Selected Poems (1998), which won the National Book Award; Odd Mercy (1995); and Bread Without Sugar (1992), winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize. His honors include the Paris Review’s Bernard F. Conners Award, the Bess Hokin Award from Poetry, the Ruth Lilly Prize, four National Endowment for the Arts grants, the Pennsylvania Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, the Jerome J. Shestack Poetry Prize from American Poetry Review, and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. In 2005, Stern was selected to receive the Wallace Stevens Award for mastery in the art of poetry.
Anne Marie Macari is the author of four books of poetry, including Red Deer in 2015. Some of the poems in Red Deer are about Macari’s experiences in the painted Ice Age caves in France and Spain. Her book Ivory Cradle won the APR/Honickman First Book Prize in 2000. Her second book, Gloryland (2005), was followed by She Heads Into the Wilderness (Autumn House, 2008). Macari’s poems and essays have appeared in many magazines and anthologies. She founded the Drew MFA Program in Poetry & Poetry in Translation and has been on the board of Alice James Books since 2004. She won the James Dickey Prize for Poetry from Five Points magazine in 2005 and the MacDowell Fellowship in 2010.
Laila Lalami
Tuesday, October 13, 7:30 p.m.
Atherton Union, Reilly Room
Laila Lalami is the author of the novels Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, which was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award; Secret Son, which was on the Orange Prize longlist, and The Moor’s Account, which was a New York Times Notable Book, a Wall Street Journal Best Book of the Year, a nominee for the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award, and a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Her essays and opinion pieces have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, The Guardian, The New York Times, and in many anthologies. Her work has been translated into 10 languages. She is the recipient of a British Council Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Lannan Foundation Residency Fellowship. Lalami is a professor of creative writing at the University of California at Riverside.
Denis Johnson
Wednesday, November 11, 7:30 p.m.
Atherton Union, Reilly Room
An award-winning novelist, short-story writer, and playwright, Denis Johnson is the author of numerous novels, including Fiskadoro (1985); Tree of Smoke, winner of the 2007 National Book Award; and Nobody Move (2009). Jesus’ Son (1992), his collection of short stories, was made into a movie of the same name. Johnson’s latest novel, The Laughing Monsters, was released in November.
Johnson, who typically writes about people on the margins of society, published his first collection of poems, The Man Among the Seals (1969), at the age of 20. Subsequent collections include Inner Weather (1976), The Incognito Lounge and Other Poems (1982), and The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly: Poems Collected and New (1995). He has received a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction and a Whiting Writers’ Award.
Dean Young
Monday, November 16, 7:30 pm
Robertson Hall, Johnson Board Room
Poet Dean Young, who earned his MFA from Indiana University, is recognized as one of the most energetic, influential poets writing today. His numerous collections of poetry include Strike Anywhere (1995), winner of the Colorado Prize for Poetry; Skid (2002), finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; Elegy on Toy Piano (2005), finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and Primitive Mentor (2008), shortlisted for the International Griffin Poetry Prize. He has also written a book on poetics, The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction (2010).
Young’s awards include the Academy Award in Literature, a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. His poems have been featured in Best American Poetry numerous times.
The following day, Strout met with students for an intimate Q & A. She discussed her writing process and where she found inspiration. “I grew up on a dirt road in Maine with all my great-aunts. They were miserable, elderly people. I went in and out of their homes like a squirrel—they didn’t care. Their voices and concerns were the music of my childhood.”
Yanagihara shared writing tips like the best time to write, handling rejection, and even her own checklist for how to successfully write complex characters. She encouraged writing “cross-difference”; that is, to write characters different from the author’s background. “If a character is a symbol of difference, he is not a character…. Know 1000 things about him besides the difference,” she said. “Be prepared for people not liking it. Don’t be defensive.”
