Amy Bloom ’75 Part of Distinguished Writers Series

The Spring 2009 Distinguished Writers Series features a short story author, New York Times Magazine writer, student poets and a Pulitzer Prize winning author.

Amy Bloom ’75, the 2009 Jacob Julien Visiting Writer, will speak at 8 p.m. Feb. 18 in Russell House. Bloom is the author of the novel Love Invents Us, the short story collection A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You, and the nonfiction work Normal. Her most recent novel, Away, was a New York Times bestseller, and she has received the National Magazine Award and been nominated for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and numerous anthologies here and abroad.

Carlo Rotella will speak at 8 p.m. Feb. 25 in Russell House. Rotella is the author of October Cities, Good With Their Hands, and, most recently, Cut Time, which received the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award and was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize. He writes for The New York Times Magazine, Washington Post Magazine, and Slate, and his work has also appeared in Harper’s and Best American Essays. He is director of American studies and professor of English at Boston College.

André Aciman, the English Department Writer in Residence, will speak at 8 p.m. March 25 in Russell House. Aciman is the author of the novel Call Me By Your Name and the nonfiction works Out of Egypt: A Memoir and False Papers: Essays on Exile and Memory. He is co-author and editor of The Proust Project and Letters of Transit. He has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Republic, and The New York Review of Books, and his pieces appear in several annual collections of the Best American Essays.

A reading by the 2009 Wesleyan Student Poets and the Connecticut Poetry Circuit Student Poets, including Wesleyan’s winner, Susanna Myrseth ’09 will be held at 8 p.m. March 26 in the Russell House.

Junot Díaz, The English Department’s 2009 Millett Writing Fellow, will speak at 8 p.m. April 1 in Memorial Chapel. Díaz is the author of the short story collection Drown and the novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, African Voices, Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories 2009. Díaz is the fiction editor at the Boston Review and The Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor at MIT.

Forrest Gander will speak at 8 p.m. April 7 in Russell House. Poet, translator, and novelist, Gander is the author of more than a dozen books, including the poetry collections Eye Against Eye and Torn Awake and the highly acclaimed novel As a Friend. He is the editor of Mouth to Mouth: Twelve Contemporary Mexican Women Poets, a bilingual anthology, and has translated numerous books of poetry. He is a professor of English and comparative literature at Brown University. His visit is organized by English Department visiting writer Martine Bellen.

Also in April is the Annie Sonnenblick Lecturer.

All events are free and open to the public. For additional information on the events, contact Lucia Pier, Russell House arts fellow, at russellhouse@wesleyan.edu or 860-685-3448. For additional information on the Writing Program, contact Anne Greene at agreene@wesleyan.edu or 860-685-3604. Support for this series is provided by the Wesleyan Writing Program, the Center for the Arts, the English Department, the Center for the Humanities, the Jacob Julien Visiting Writer Fund, and the Annie Sonnenblick Lecture Fund.