Women Poets and Writers At Barnard present:
2008-09 Reading Series Summary
(see the authors' bios below)

Unless noted otherwise, the readings are on Tuesday evenings,
 and the rooms are on the Barnard College campus.

MARY GORDON, JULIA LEIGH, and SIGRID NUNEZ 
(authors currently teaching at Barnard)
Writers at Barnard

Bios:

September 25, 2008:

• Serge Gavronsky was born in Paris and most likely will die in New York. In the meantime he has published eleven books of poetry in French and two in English, the latest one: AndOrThe (Talisman). Four of his novels (not published in the US) have been translated in Italy. His second one, in English, is forthcoming this summer from Spuyten Duyvil: The Sudden Death Of. He has also published a number of books of essays (some translated in Italy) as well as works of criticism. As a translator he has numerous works on contemporary French poets (male and female!); his latest just published, Essential Poems and Writings of Joyce Mansour, Translated with an Introduction (Black Widow Press). He is presently preparing his second exhibit of his work on paper and canvas (Holland Tunnel).
   
• Sean Singer’s first book Discography won the 2001 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, selected by W.S. Merwin, and the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. He is also the recipient of an artists’ grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and a 2005 Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

October 7, 2008:

• Jill Bialosky is the author three books of poetry, Intruder, Subterranean, and The End of Desire. She is also the author two novels, The Life Room and House Under Snow (2002), and is the co-editor, with Helen Schulman, of the anthology Wanting A Child (1998). Her awards include the Elliot Coleman Award in Poetry. She is currently an editor at W. W. Norton & Company. Bialosky’s poetry is “poignant, perilous, overwhelmingly aware of the extent to which our lives, inner and outer, are deflected by contingency, and by drives of love and death that govern us” (Harold Bloom).
   
• Joanna Klink is the author of Circadian and They Are Sleeping, and her work has appeared in the Kenyon Review, Denver Quarterly, Boston Review, and other journals. She is a recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award in 2003 and teaches at the University of Montana. “These radiant poems” are “notes from a wilderness where human destiny pulses in time with vast circadians at the edge of consciousness” (Honor Moore).
   
• Victoria Redel is the author of two books of poetry, Already the World and Swoon, and three books of fiction, including The Border of Truth and Loverboy, which won the 2001 S. Mariella Gable Novel Award and the 2002 Forward Silver Literary Fiction Prize and was chosen in 2001 as a Los Angeles Times Best Book. Redel is on the faculty of Sarah Lawrence College and teaches in the Graduate Writing Program at Columbia University. Her poems "sing from the 'full catastrophe' of a woman's life: erotic life and mother love swooning in the same book, often in the same poem!...The world is richer because of it, and truer and less lonely" (Marie Howe).

October 14, 2008:

• Mary Gordon's most recent novel, Pearl, was published in January 2005 by Pantheon Books. Her previous novels—Final Payments, The Company of Women, Men and Angels, The Other Side, and Spending—have been bestsellers.  She has also written two critically-acclaimed memoirs, The Shadow Man, about her father and, most recently, Circling My Mother.  In addition, she has published a book of novellas, The Rest of Life; two collections of stories, Temporary Shelter and The Stories of Mary Gordon, which won The Story Prize in 2007; two books of essays, Good Boys and Dead Girls and Seeing Through Places; and has written a biography of Joan of Arc.  Mary has received the Lila Acheson Wallace Reader’s Digest Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Academy Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, to which she was inducted as a member in 2007.  For three years (1983, 1997, and 2000), she was the recipient of the O. Henry Award for best short story.  In March, 2008, she was named the official New York State Author and was awarded the Edith Wharton Citation of Merit for Fiction.  Mary is McIntosh Professor of English at Barnard College.
   
• Sigrid Nunez has published five novels, including A Feather on the Breath of God, For Rouenna and, most recently, The Last of Her Kind. She has also contributed stories and articles to various journals such as The New York Times, The Believer, Harper’s, and O: The Oprah Magazine.
  
  Nunez’s work has been included in several anthologies, including two Pushcart Prize volumes. Among other honors she has received are a Whiting Writer’s Award, the Rome Prize in Literature, a Berlin Prize Fellowship, and a Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Further information can be found at the author’s Web site: www.sigridnunez.com.
   

February 3, 2009

• Meena Alexander's books of poetry include Illiterate Heart, which won the PEN Open Book Award, Raw Silk, and Quickly Changing River. She is also the author of two books of prose, Poetics of Dislocation and the memoir Fault Lines. She teaches at Hunter College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York.
   

• Mary Jo Bang is the author of five books of poems, the most recent of which, Elegy, received the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her sixth collection, The Bride of E, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press. She teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.
   

• Mónica De La Torre is author of three books of poetry, Talk Shows, Ac˙fenos, and Public Domain. She co-wrote the artist book Appendices, Illustrations & Notes, and co-edited Reversible Monuments: Mexican Contemporary Poetry. She is senior editor at BOMB Magazine.

February 24, 2009

• Christopher Ricks will give a lecture on American poet Louise Bogan (1897-1970), alongside English poet and children’s author Edith Nesbit (1858-1924). Ricks is Professor of Poetry at Oxford University and co-director of the Editorial Institute at Boston University. He is the author of many critical studies, including Milton’s Grand Style, The Force of Poetry, Allusion to the Poets, Beckett’s Dying Words, and Dylan’s Visions of Sin. He is presently at work on a full critical edition of T. S. Eliot’s complete poems.

March 24, 2009:

• Poet and fiction writer Yvette Christiansë was born in South Africa under apartheid and immigrated with her parents to Australia at age 18. Her work has been published internationally, and her poetry collection, Castaway, was a finalist for the 2001 PEN International Poetry Prize. Her acclaimed first novel, Unconfessed, is based on the life of a slave woman in the Cape Colony and was a finalist for the 2007 Hemingway/PEN International Prize for First Fiction. Christiansë received her Ph.D. from the University of Sydney and teaches in the English department at Fordham University, NY.

April 14, 2009:

• Aaron Hamburger was awarded the Rome Prize by the American Academy of Arts and Letters for his short story collection The View From Stalin's Head (Random House, 2004), which was also nominated for a Violet Quill Award.  His next book, a novel titled Faith For Beginners (Random House, 2005), was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award.  His writing has appeared in Poets and Writers, Tin House, Details, Out, Time Out New York, and the Forward, and he has won a fellowship from the Edward F. Albee Foundation.  Currently he teaches creative writing at Columbia University and the Stonecoast MFA Program.
   
• Eliza Minot is the author of the novels The Tiny One and The Brambles, both published by Alfred A. Knopf. Her work has appeared in the magazines Real Simple, The New York Times Magazine>, Allure, Travel and Leisure Family, and Hallmark, among others, as well as in the anthologies The Dictionary of Failed Relationships and Sex and Sensibility. She is a 2007 recipient of a Prose Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and is at work on her third novel titled American Standard.
   
• Darcey Steinke is the author of four books, three of which were New York Times Notables.  Easter Everywhere, a memoir, was published in 2007. Her novel Suicide Blonde has been translated into eight languages, and her novel Milk has been translated into four.  Her non-fiction has been featured in Vogue, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Village Voice, Spin, The Boston Review, and The New York Times.  She currently teaches at both Columbia and New School University in New York City.  She lives with her daughter in Brooklyn.

April 7, 2009:

• Katha Pollitt is the author of Antarctic Traveller, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and a new book of poems forthcoming in 2009. She is also the author of several books of prose, including Reasonable Creatures: Essays on Women and Feminism and Learning to Drive. Pollitt’s “Subject to Debate” column for The Nation is “the best place to go for original thinking on the left” (Washington Post).
   
• Evie Shockley is the author of a half-red sea (2006) and two chapbooks, The Gorgon Goddess (2001) and 31 words  *  prose poems (2007).  Currently a guest editor of jubilat, her recent poems appear in The Southern Review, Ecotone, Achiote Seeds, La Petite Zine, Columbia Poetry Review, and Tuesday. Shockley teaches at Rutgers University. 
   
• Rachel Wetzsteon is the author of three collections of poems, The Other Stars,  Home and Away, and Sakura Park. She is also the author of Influential Ghosts: A Study of Auden's Sources. She has received grants and prizes from the Ingram Merrill Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She teaches at William Paterson University 

For more information on Women Poets at Barnard, contact its Director, Prof. Saskia Hamilton, at shamilton(at)barnard(dot)edu,