For aspiring authors in the Delaware Valley, the first chapter to literary success begins at Rutgers University–Camden, as the nation’s top authors, poets, editors and publishers once again visit the campus to lead a series of inspiring and engaging readings and workshops.
Thanks to funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rutgers–Camden master of fine arts (MFA) program in creative writing will continue its celebrated Writers in Camden series, which is free and open to the public.
Readings will be held on Wednesdays at 7:30 p.m. in the Stedman Gallery in the Fine Arts Complex – unless otherwise noted – and are followed by Q & A sessions and receptions with the authors.
The series will begin on Sept. 24 with readings by Elizabeth McCracken and Teddy Wayne in the Multi-Purpose Room on the main level of the Campus Center.
Elizabeth McCracken is the author of five books: Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry, the novels The Giant’s House and Niagara Falls All Over Again, the memoir An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, and the forthcoming Thunderstruck & Other Stories. She has received grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Liguria Study Center, the American Academy in Berlin, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
Teddy Wayne is the author of the novels The Love Song of Jonny Valentine and Kapitoil, for which he won the Whiting Writers’ Award. He is also a recipient of a National Education Association Creative Writing Fellowship, a PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, and a New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, and was a finalist for a Dayton Literary Peace Prize. A columnist for The New York Times, he regularly appears in The New Yorker, GQ, and McSweeney’s. He has taught at Columbia University, Washington University, and the Yale Writers’ Conference.
Oct. 15
Brenda Shaughnessy and Steve Scafidi will read.
Brenda Shaughnessy, anassistant professor of English and the MFA program at Rutgers University–Newark, is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Our Andromeda – one of The New York Times’ 100 Notable Books of 2013. Her other books are Human Dark with Sugar, winner of the James Laughlin Award, and Interior with Sudden Joy. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Paris Review. She is a 2013 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow.
Steve Scafidi, a cabinetmaker by trade, is the author of three poetry collections: the recent The Cabinetmaker’s Window, For Love of Common Words, and Sparks from a Nine-Pound Hammer, which won the fifth annual Levis Reading Prize.
Nov. 12
Justin Torres and Gina Apostol will read.
Justin Torres has published short fiction in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, Tin House, The Washington Post, as well as nonfiction pieces in publications such as The Guardian and The Advocate. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Torres was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and is currently a fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center. His debut novel, We the Animals, was a national bestseller and has been translated into 15 languages.
Gina Apostol’s third novel, Gun Dealers’ Daughter, won the PEN/Open Book Award and was shortlisted for the Saroyan International Prize. She is a two-time winner of the Philippine National Book Award for her first two novels, Bibliolepsy and The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata. She has received fellowships from Civitella Ranieri, Phillips Exeter Academy, and Hawthornden Castle. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Gettysburg Review, Charlie Chan is Dead, Volume 2, The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Foreign Policy, and other publications. She is currently working on a fourth novel, William McKinley’s World, set in 1901 in Balangiga and Tacloban during the Filipino-American war.
Dec. 3
Writers Reginald Dwayne Betts, Randall Horton, and Linda Perez will read and lead a discussion on “Contemporary Authors and the Prisons.”
Reginald Dwayne Betts’latest collection of poems is the forthcoming Bastards of the Reagan Era. His first collection of poems, Shahid Reads His Own Palm, won the Beatrice Hawley Award. Betts’ memoir, A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison, was the recipient of the 2010 NAACP Image Award for nonfiction. His writing has also earned him a Soros Justice Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship, a Ruth Lily Fellowship, and a Pushcart Prize. In addition to his writing, Betts serves as the national spokesperson for the Campaign for Youth Justice and was appointed to the Coordinating Council of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention by President Barack Obama. He is currently a student at Yale Law School.
Randall Horton is the recipient of the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award, the Bea Gonzalez Poetry Award, and, most recently, a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in Literature. Horton is a Cave Canem Fellow, a member of the Affrilachian Poets, and a member of the Symphony: the House that Etheridge Built, a reading collective named for the poet Etheridge Knight. An assistant professor of English at the University of New Haven, he is the author of the memoir Roxbury and the poetry collection Pitch Dark Anarchy.
Linda Perez’s writings appear or will appear in Black Renaissance Noir, Valley Voices, and the New Sound: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Arts & Literature.