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Vanderbilt Creative Writing Presents

Posted by on Sunday, September 11, 2011 in Archives, News.

2010 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNERS IN POETRY AND FICTION TO READ AT VANDERBILT UNIVESITY ON SEPTEMBER 22, 2011

Terrance Hayes, winner of the award for poetry, and Jaimy Gordon, winner of the award for fiction, will read together on September 22, 2011 at 7 pm in Vanderbilt University-€™s Sarratt Student Center Cinema.   The reading, which is part of the Creative Writing Program-€™s  Gertrude Vanderbilt and Harold S. Vanderbilt Visiting Writers Series, is free and open to the public.

Poet Terrance Hayes  won the 2010 National Book Award for his book,  Lighthead, published by Penguin.   He is also the author of  Wind in a Box (Penguin, 2006) and  Hip Logic (Penguin, 2002), which won the 2001 National Poetry Series and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award and runner-up for the American Academy of Poets-€™ James Laughlin Award.   His first book,  Muscular Music (1999), won him the prestigious Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a Whiting Writers Award.

About his work poet Cornelus Eady has written, -€œFirst you-€™ll marvel at his skill, his near-perfect pitch, his disarming humor, his brilliant turns of phrase.   Then you-€™ll notice the grace, the tenderness, the unblinking truth-telling just beneath his lines, the open and generous way he takes in our world.-€   Hayes is professor of Creative Writing at Carnegie Mellon University.

Fiction writer Jamy Gordon won the 2010 National Book Award for her novel,  Lord of Misrule, first published in hardback by a small press, McPherson & Company.   After the book was named a finalist for the National Book Award, Vintage Anchor acquired the paperback rights.

Gordon-€™s previous novels were  Shamp of the City-Solo (McPherson, 1974),  She Drove Without Stopping (Algonquin, 1990), and  Bogeywoman, which was on the  Los Angeles Times-€™ list of Best Fiction of 2000.   Gordon has been a Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and at the Bunting Institute, now the Radcliffe Institute of Harvard University.   She also publishes poems, essays and translations and her short fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories.   She teaches at Western Michigan University and in the Prague Summer Program for Writers.

The reading is co-sponsored by the Creative Writing Program and by the Office of the Dean of Students.   Sarratt Student Center Cinema is located at 2301 Vanderbilt Place.

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