Holy Cross Spring 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 spring semester. All readings are free and open to the public. This series is sponsored by the College’s Creative Writing Program.

March 30 Ron Hansen 7:30 p.m., Rehm Library

Ron Hansen was born in Omaha, Neb., and educated at Creighton University, the University of Iowa’s Writers Workshop, and at Stanford University, where he held a Wallace Stegner Creative Writing Fellowship. His first published novel was Desperadoes, which was followed by The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Mariette in Ecstasy, Atticus, and Hitler’s Niece. In Nebraska he collected stories that previously appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Harper’s Magazine, The Paris Review, and other quarterlies. He has also published a children’s book, The Shadowmaker, and edited two anthologies of short fiction, You Don’t Know What Love Is and You’ve Got to Read This. Hansen’s most recent novel is Isn’t It Romantic? He also recently published A Stay Against Confusion: Essays on Faith and Fiction. He has received fellowships from the Michigan Society of Fellows, the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the Lyndhurst Foundation, and was presented with an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Hansen has taught fiction and screenwriting at such institutions as Stanford, Michigan, Cornell, Iowa, Arizona, and is now the Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J. Professor in the Arts and Humanities at Santa Clara, where he earned an M.A. in spirituality in 1995.

April 6 Le Thi Diem Thuy 7:30 p.m., Levis Browsing Room, Dinand Library

Lê thi diem thúy is a writer and solo performance artist. Born in southern Vietnam and raised in southern California, she often explores in her work the role of the body as the site of memory. lê is the author of the debut novel, The Gangster We Are All Looking For. Her prose and poetry have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Harper’s Magazine, Muae and The Best American Essays as well as in the anthologies Killing the Buddha: A Heretic’s Bible, The Very Inside, Half & Half, and Watermark. Her solo performance works Red Fiery Summer, the bodies between us, and Carte Postale have been presented at — among other venues — the Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris, the International Women Playwrights’ Festival in Galway, Ireland, the New World Theater at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and the Marfa Theater Company in Marfa, Texas. She has been awarded residencies from the Headlands Center For The Arts, the GAEA Foundation, and the Lannan Foundation and fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute For Advanced Study and the Guggenheim Foundation. She is currently Elizabeth Drew Professor in the department of English Language and Literature at Smith College.

April 20 Bill Roorbach 7:30 p.m., Rehm Library This event has been cancelled.

Bill Roorbach is the author of Temple Stream, which has won the Maine Literary Award for best nonfiction book of the year. His fiction includes Big Bend, short stories, and The Smallest Color, a novel. Roorbach’s nonfiction works include A Place on Water, with Robert Kimber and Wesley McNair, Into Woods, Summers with Juliet, and The Art of Truth, an anthology of literary memoirs, personal essays and literary journalism which he edited. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, Granta and others. He is a visiting professor in the English department and the Jenks Chair in Contemporary American Letters at Holy Cross.

April 27 Leila Philip and Bob Cording with selected students 7:30 p.m., Levis Browsing Room, Dinand Library

A member of the Holy Cross faculty since 2003, Leila Philip is the author of The Road Through Miyana, a memoir of her apprenticeship to a master potter in Japan that won the PEN 1990 Martha Albrand Citation for Nonfiction, and the award-winning A Family Place, the story of her ancestral Hudson River home which mixes history, natural history, and autobiography as it examines our sense of home, and Hidden Dialogue: A Discussion Between Women in Japan and the United States. She has received numerous awards for her writing, including fellowships from the National Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Association of University Women. Her essays have been anthologized widely and she has published articles and essay nationally in major newspapers and magazines.

Cording has published four collections of poetry, including Life-List, which won the Ohio State University Press/Journal award, in 1987; What Binds Us To This World; Heavy Grace; and Against Consolation. He also has contributed more than 300 poems to magazines such as The Nation, Image, Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Poetry, DoubleTake, Orion, Paris Review and the New Yorker. Cording’s work has appeared in several anthologies, including The Best Spiritual Writing of 2000, 2001, 2002 and 2004; the Pushcart Anthology, 2002; and Godine’s Poets of the New Century. He has received a number of awards and grants, including a previous fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and fellowships from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. In 1992, he was poet in residence at the Frost Place in Franconia, N.H. He is the James N. and Sarah L. O’Reilly Barrett Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at Holy Cross.