Holy Cross Fall 2006 Visiting Writers Series

WORCESTER, Mass. – As part of the College of the Holy Cross Visiting Writers Lecture Series, the following writers will give readings during the 2006 fall semester. All readings are free and open to the public. This series is sponsored by the College’s Creative Writing Program.

Oct. 4 Daniel Tobin 7:30 p.m., Levis Browsing Room, Dinand Library

Daniel Tobin is the author of three books of poems, Where the World is Made (University Press of New England, 1999), Double Life (Louisiana State University Press, 2004) and The Narrows (Four Way Books, 2005). Among his awards are The Discovery/The Nation Award, The Robert Penn Warren Award, The Greensboro Review Prize, the Robert Frost Fellowship, the Katherine Bakeless Nason Prize, and a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Most recently, The Narrows was a featured book on Poetry Daily, as well as a finalist for the Foreword Poetry Book Award. Four Way Books will publish his fourth book of poems, Second Things, in 2008. His poems have appeared widely in such journals as The Nation, The Harvard Review, Poetry, The American Scholar, The Paris Review, The Southern Review, The Sewanee Review, The Hudson Review, DoubleTake, The Kenyon Review, Image, The Times Literary Supplement (England), Stand (England), Agenda (England), Descant (Canada) and Poetry Ireland Review. His critical study, Passage to the Center: Imagination and the Sacred in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney, came out to wide praise from the University of Kentucky Press in 1999. Tobin has also edited The Book of Irish American Poetry from the Eighteenth Century to the Present (University of Notre Dame Press, Fall 2006). He is chair of the department of writing, literature, and publishing at Emerson College.

Oct. 26 Robin Hemley 7:30 p.m., Rehm Library

Robin Hemley has published seven books of nonfiction and fiction. His latest book, Invented Eden, The Elusive, Disputed History of the Tasaday (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003) deals with a purported anthropological hoax in the Philippines. Invented Eden was an American Library Association Editor’s Choice book for 2003. Robin Hemley co-edited the anthology Extreme Fiction: Fabulists and Formalists with Michael Martone (Longman, 2004), and is the author of the memoir, Nola: A Memoir Of Faith, Art And Madness (Graywolf, 1998), which won an Independent Press Book Award for Nonfiction. His popular craft book Turning Life Into Fiction, which was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection as well as a Quality Paperback Book Club Selection, has sold over 40,000 copies and will soon be reissued by Graywolf Press. He is also the author of the novel, The Last Studebaker (Graywolf) and the story collections, The Big Ear (Blair) and All You Can Eat (Atlantic Monthly Press). His awards for his fiction include, The Nelson Algren Award from The Chicago Tribune, The George Garrett Award for Fiction from Willow Springs, the Hugh J. Luke Award from Prairie Schooner, two Pushcart Prizes, and many others. He has published his work in many of the best literary magazines in the country, including Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, Willow Springs, Boulevard, Witness, ACM, North American Review, and many others. His fiction has been widely anthologized, translated, and heard on NPR’s “Selected Shorts” and others.

Nov. 9 Cleopatra Mathis 4:30 p.m., Levis Browsing Room, Dinand Library

This event has been canceled.

Cleopatra Mathis was born and raised in Ruston, Louisiana. Her first five books of poems were published by Sheep Meadow Press and include Aerial View of Louisiana (1979); The Bottom Land (1983); The Center for Cold Water (1989); Guardian (1995); and What to Tip the Boatman (2001), which won the Jane Kenyon Award for Outstanding Book of Poems in 2001. Her latest collection of poems, White Sea was published by Sarabande Books in 2005. Cleopatra Mathis’ work has appeared widely in anthologies, textbooks, magazines and journals, including The New Yorker, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Tri-Quarterly, The Southern Review, The Georgia Review, The Made Thing: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern Poetry, The Extraordinary Tide: Poetry by American Women, and The Practice of Poetry. Various prizes for her work include two National Endowment for the Arts grants, in 1984 and 2003; the Peter Lavin Award for Younger Poets from the Academy of American Poets; a Pushcart Prize; The Robert Frost Award; a 1981-82 Fellowship in Poetry at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown; The May Sarton Award; and Individual Artist Fellowships in Poetry from both the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts and the New Jersey State Arts Council. Since 1982, Mathis has been professor of English and creative writing at Dartmouth College, where she directs the creative writing program.

Nov. 16 Debra Spark 7:30 p.m., Levis Browsing Room, Dinand Library

Debra Spark is the author of the novels Coconuts for the Saint (Faber & Faber, Avon) and The Ghost of Bridgetown (Graywolf) and editor of the anthology Twenty Under Thirty: Best Stories by America’s New Young Writers (Scribners). Her thoughts on the craft of writing have been collected in Curious Attractions: Essays on Fiction Writing (University of Michigan Press). Short fiction, essays, articles and book reviews have appeared in Esquire, Ploughshares, Epoch, Agni, Gingko Tree Review, narrativemagazine.com, The New York Times, New England Travel and Life, Food and Wine, Yankee, Down East, The Washington Post and The San Francisco Chronicle, among other places. She has been the recipient of several awards including an NEA fellowship, a Bunting Institute fellowship from Radcliffe College, a Pushcart Prize, and the John Zacharis / Ploughshares award for best first book. She teaches at Colby College and in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She lives with her husband and son in North Yarmouth, Maine.