Four faculty members from the 2008 Callaloo Creative Writing Workshops will read from their poetry and fiction at 7 p.m. Aug. 6 in Duncker Hall, Room 201, Hurst Lounge.
The event is free and open to the public. A reception for the authors will immediately follow.
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 — an annual national event hosted this year by WUSTL from Aug. 3-16 — 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 earned degrees in English and creative writing from Harvard College and Columbia University and teaches creative writing at Princeton University.
Jordan is the author of “Rise” (2001), “M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A” (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 Eight-eenth-Century New York” (2007) — as well as the graphic novels “Papa Midnight” (2006) and “Incognegro” (2008). He earned an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University and 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 Workshops will conclude with two nights of student readings at 7 p.m. Aug. 14 and 15, also in Hurst Lounge.
For more information, e-mail Dorothy Negri at dlnegri@artsci.wustl.edu or call 935-5190.