Four faculty members from the 2008 Callaloo Creative Writing Workshops will read from their poetry and fiction at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 6.
The event is free and open to the public and takes place in Washington University’s Hurst Lounge, Room 201, Duncker Hall. A reception for the authors will immediately follow. Duncker Hall is located in Brookings Quadrangle, near the intersection of Brookings and Hoyt drives.
For more information, contact Dorothy Negri at (314) 935-5190 or email dlnegri@artsci.wustl.edu.
Launched in 1976 by editor Charles H. Rowell, Callaloo is the premier African-American and African literary journal, publishing a rich mixture of fiction, poetry, plays, critical essays, interviews and visual art from the African diaspora. The annual Callaloo Creative Writing Workshops — hosted this year by Washington University, from Aug. 3 to 16 — are designed to assist new and developing writers by providing intensive and individual instruction in the writing of fiction and poetry.
The Aug. 6 event will feature readings by poets Tracy K. Smith and A. Van Jordan, and by fiction writers Mat Johnson and Nelly Rosario.
Smith is the author of The Body’s Question (2003) which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and a Whiting Writers Award, and Duende, (2007), which received the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her work has appeared in numerous journals as well as in the anthologies Poetry 30, Poetry Daily, and Autumn House. She received degrees in English and creative writing from Harvard College and Columbia University, and currently teaches creative writing at Princeton University.
Jordan is the author of Rise (2001), MACNOLIA (2004) and Quantum Lyrics (2007). His numerous honors include the Whiting Writers Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award and the Pushcart Prize. Jordan teaches at the University of Texas at Austin and serves on the faculty at the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Johnson is the author of three books — Drop (2000), Hunting in Harlem (2003) and The Great Negro Plot: A Tale of Conspiracy and Murder in Eighteenth-Century New York (2007) — as well as the graphic novels Papa Midnight (2006) and Incognegro (2008). He received an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University and currently teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston.
Rosario is author of Song of the Water Saints (2002), a novel tracing the lives of three generations of Dominican women and winner of the PEN Open Book Award. Other honors include a Barbara Deming Memorial Fund Fellowship, The Bronx Writers’ Center Van Lier Literary Fellowship, two National Arts Club Writing Fellowships, the Hurston/Wright Award in Fiction and the National Teachers in English Writing Award.
In addition to the faculty readings, the Callaloo Creative Writings Workshop will conclude with two nights of student readings, at 7 p.m. Thursday and Friday, Aug. 14 and 15, also in Hurst Lounge.
