All readings are held at 7 PM at the Stedman Gallery, Fine Arts Building, and are followed by Q&A sessions and receptions with the authors. All are free and open to the public. Note: This reading is in Multipurpose Room, Campus Center

September 23

Jane Alison

Jane Alison's most recent book is the memoir The Sisters Antipodes. Her first novel, The Love-Artist, was published in 2001 and has been translated into seven languages; it was followed by The Marriage of the Sea, a New York Times Notable Book of 2003, and Natives and Exotics.  She lives in Miami Beach and teaches at the University of Miami and Queens University of Charlotte

Ru Freeman

A native of Sri Lanka, Ru Freeman is the author of A Disobedient Girl, which will be published in Dutch, Italian, Chinese, Portuguese and Hebrew.  Her political writing has appeared in English and in translation, and her creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in Guernica,Crab Orchard Review, WriteCorner Press, Kaduwa and elsewhere.

October 14

Gabrielle Calvocoressi

Gabrielle Calvocoressi' s first poetry collection, The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart, was shortlisted for the Northern California Book Award and won the 2006 Connecticut Book Award in Poetry; her collection Apocalyptic Swing is forthcoming from Persea Books.  She has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including a Stegner fellowship in Poetry, a Jones Lectureship in Poetry at Stanford University and a Rona Jaffe Woman Writers' Award. Her poem "Circus Fire, 1944" received The Paris Review's Bernard F. Conners Prize.

Daniel Alarcon

Daniel Alarcón is Associate Editor of Etiqueta Negra, an award-winning magazine published in his native Lima, Peru.  He is a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Latin American Studies at UC Berkeley, and the author of two works of fiction, War by Candlelight, a 2006 PEN/Hemingway Award Finalist and Lost City Radio, a novel published in more than a dozen countries. He has won numerous prizes, including a Whiting Award, Guggenheim and Lannan Fellowships, and a National Magazine Award.

November 18

Note: this reading only in Multipurpose Room, Campus Center.

Lauren Grodstein

Lauren Grodstein' s most recent novel is A Friend of the Family.  Her previous works include Reproduction is the Flaw of Love, an Amazon.com Breakout Book and a Borders Original Voices pick, the story collection, The Best of Animals and the pseudonymous Girls Dinner Club, which was a New York Public Library Book for the Teen Age. Her work has been translated into German, Italian, French, Turkish, and other languages, and her essays and stories have been widely anthologized.  She is an assistant professor of English at Rutgers-Camden.

Adam Mansbach

Adam Mansbach's latest novel, The End of the Jews won the California Book Award for Fiction.  Mansbach' s previous novel, the bestselling Angry Black White Boy, was a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2005, and the recipient of an Honorable Citation from the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Awards and a PEN/Faulkner Writers in the Schools grant.  Mansbach is an inaugural recipient of the Future Aesthetics Artist Regrant (FAAR), funded by the Ford Foundation.  He currently serves as the 2009-2010 New Voices Professor of Fiction at Rutgers University.

December 9

Madison Smartt Bell

Madison Smartt Bell is the author of thirteen novels, including All Souls' Rising, a finalist for the 1995 National Book Award, which won the 1996 PEN/Faulkner Award and the1996 Anisfield-Wolf award for the best book of the year dealing with matters of race; other books include the novel Doctor Sleep, which was adapted as a film.  Devil's Dream, a novel based on the career of Confederate Cavalry General Nathan Bedford Forrest, is Bell' s most recently published novel.  In 1999, he was appointed Director of the Kratz Center for Creative Writing at Goucher College.  In 2008 he received the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

February 17

Nathalie Handal

Nathalie Handal' s work has appeared in Poetrywales, Ploughshares, Poetry New Zealand, Stand Magazine, Crab Orchard Review, Perihelion, and The Literary Review, and has been translated into more than fifteen languages.  She is the author of the poetry collections The NeverField and The Lives of Rain, which was short-listed for The Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize.  Her forthcoming poetry book, Love and Strange Horses, will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press.

Juan Sebastian Agudelo

Juan Sebastian Agudelo' s poetry collection, To the Bone, was the winner of the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize in 2008.  He is also the author of the artist collaboration book On Collecting, published by Shandy Press. His translations of Lowell and O' Hara have been published by Ediciones el Equilibrista. Agudelo has taught at Temple, Drexel and The University of the Arts.

March 10

Alexander Chee

Alexander Chee received a 2003 Whiting Writer' s Award and a 2004 NEA Fellowship in Fiction.  His first novel, Edinburgh, won the Michener Copernicus Prize, the AAWW Lit Award and the Lambda Editor' s Choice Prize, and was a Publisher' s Weekly Best Book of the Year and a Booksense 76 selection.  His essays and stories have appeared in Granta.com, Out, The Man I Might Become, Loss Within Loss, Men On Men 2000, His 3 and Boys Like Us.  He is currently the Visiting Writer at Amherst College and lives in Western Massachusetts.  His second novel, The Queen of the Night, is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

David Shields

David Shields's most recent book, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead, was a New York Times bestseller. He is the author of eight previous books, including Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity, winner of the PEN/Revson Award, and Dead Languages: A Novel, winner of the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. His essays and stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, Yale Review, Village Voice, Salon, Slate, McSweeney's, and Utne Reader; he's written reviews for the New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Times Book Review, Boston Globe, and Philadelphia Inquirer. Shields has received a Guggenheim fellowship, two NEA fellowships, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, a Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation grant, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship.

April 7

Paul Beatty
Paul Beatty is the author of The White Boy Shuffle, Tuff, and Slumberland, and editor of an anthology of African-American humor, Hokum.  Beatty' s two poetry collections are Big Bank Take Little Bank and Joker, Joker, Deuce.