SINGLE VOICE READING SERIES

ALLEGHENY COLLEGE

2009-2010

Courtney Zoffness, Sept. 15th. Tillotson Room, 8pm

Courtney Zoffness' fiction has appeared Washington Square, Saint Ann's Review, Tampa Review, and elsewhere, and has been honored by Best New American Voices, the UA Foundation, and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. The former managing editor of the United Nations-sponsored Earth Times, Zoffness has also contributed dozens of features and reviews to the New York Metro, MTV Networks, and Ladies' Home Journal. She studied writing at the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Arizona, and has taught at University of Pennsylvania and Yale University. Currently she's a visiting assistant professor at Allegheny College.

Willard Spiegelman, October 1st. Quigley Auditorium. 8pm.

Photo by Miriam Berkely

Willard Spiegelman is the Hughes Professor of English at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, and the editor-in-chief of The Southwest Review, this country's third oldest, continuously published literary quarterly. He is a regular contributor to the Leisure & Arts pages of The Wall Street Journal, and the author of five books of literary criticism. Seven Pleasures: Essays on Ordinary Happiness (Farrar Straus Giroux) is a his first non-academic book.

David Baker. October 21st. Quigley Auditorium. 8pm.

David Baker is the author or editor of twelve books, including nine books of poetry and several critical volumes. He has won awards and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Ohio Arts Council, Poetry Society of America, and elsewhere. Baker has taught at Kenyon College, the University of Michigan, the Ohio State University, and is currently Professor of English at Denison University where he holds the Thomas B. Fordham Chair of Creative Writing. He serves on the faculty of the MFA program for writers at Warren Wilson College and is Poetry Editor of The Kenyon Review.

Julie Otsuka. October 28th. Tillotson Room. 8pm.
Sponsored by the Office of Diversity Affairs.

Photo by Jerry Bauer

Julie Otsuka is the author of the novel When the Emperor Was Divine, loosely based on the story of her Japanese-American family's internment during the second World War. Otsuka was winner of the sixth annual Asian American Literary Award in 2003 and was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2004.

Geoffrey Brock and Padma Viswanathan. February 11th, 2010. Tillotson Room, 8pm.

Padma Viswanathan is a fiction writer, playwright and journalist. She has published fiction in New Letters, Subtropics, and The Malahat Review, and took first prize in the 2006 Boston Review Short Story Contest. Other writing awards include residencies at the Banff Playwrights' Colony, Sacatar, and The MacDowell Colony. Her first novel, The Toss of a Lemon has been published in six countries and shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Regional) for Best First Book and the Amazon.ca First Novel Prize.

Geoffrey Brock is the author of Weighing Light: Poems and the translator of books by Cesare Pavese, Umberto Eco, and others. He has been a Stegner Fellow, an NEA Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow. He teaches in the MFA Programs in Creative Writing and Translation at the University of Arkansas.

Robert B. Hass and Keith Taylor. April 22nd, 2010. Tilloston Room, 8pm.

Robert Bernard Hass is the author of Going by Contraries: Robert Frost's Conflict with Science, which was selected by Choice as an Outstanding Academic Title in 2004, and the poetry collection, Counting Thunder. His poems and essays have appeared in many journals, including Poetry, Sewanee Review, Agni, and The Kenyon Review. He has won an Academy of American Poets Prize, an AWP Intro Journals Award, and a fellowship to Bread Loaf. He is currently Professor of English at Edinboro University.

Keith Taylor (left) and Gary Snyder

Keith Taylor is the author of many volumes of poetry, including If the World Becomes So Bright and Guilty at the Rapture; he is also co-translator of Battered Guitars: Poetry and Prose of Kostas Karyotakis. Taylor has won awards for his work here and in Europe, including Fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts and in fiction from the Michigan Council for the Arts. He teaches at the University of Michigan, where he coordinates the undergraduate program in creative writing and directs the Bear River Writers Conference.

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