Women Poets and Great Writers At Barnard present:
2008-09 Reading Series Summary
(see the authors' bios below)

Unless noted otherwise, the readings are on Tuesday evenings,
 and the rooms are on the Barnard College campus.

MARY GORDON and SIGRID NUNEZ 
(authors currently teaching at Barnard)
Great Writers at Barnard

TBA
Women Poets at Barnard

Bios:

September 25, 2008:

• Serge Gavronsky was born in Paris and mostly likely will die in New York. In the meantime he has published eleven books of poetry in French and two in English, the latest one: ANDORTHE (Talisman). Four of his novels (not published in the US) have been translated in Italy. His second one, in English, is forthcoming this summer from Spuyten Duyvil: “The Sudden Death of”. He has also published a number of books of essays (some translated in Italy) as well as works of criticism. As a translator he has numerous works on contemporary French poets (male and female!); his latest just published, “Essential Poems and Writings of Joyce Mansour, Translated with an Introduction” (Black Widow Press). He is presently preparing his second exhibit of his work on paper and canvas (Holland Tunnel).
   
• Sean Singer’s first book Discography won the 2001 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, selected by W.S. Merwin, and the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. He is also the recipient of an artists’ grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and a 2005 Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

TBA (fall), 2008:

October 7, 2008:

• Jill Bialosky is the author three books of poetry, ____, Subterranean, and The End of Desire. She is also the author two novels, The Life Room and House Under Snow (2002), and is the co-editor, with Helen Schulman, of the anthology Wanting A Child (1998). Her awards include the Elliot Coleman Award in Poetry. She is currently an editor at W. W. Norton & Company. Bialosky’s poetry is “poignant, perilous, overwhelmingly aware of the extent to which our lives, inner and outer, are deflected by contingency, and by drives of love and death that govern us” (Harold Bloom).
   
• Joanna Klink is the author of Circadian and They Are Sleeping, and her work has appeared in the Kenyon Review, Denver Quarterly, Boston Review, and other journals. She is a recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award in 2003 and teaches at the University of Montana. “These radiant poems” are “notes from a wilderness where human destiny pulses in time with vast circadians at the edge of consciousness” (Honor Moore).
   
• Victoria Redel is the author of two books of poetry, Already the World and Swoon, and three books of fiction, The Border of Truth and Loverboy, which won the 2001 S. Mariella Gable Novel Award and the 2002 Forward Silver Literary Fiction Prize and was chosen in 2001 as a Los Angeles Times Best Book. Redel is on the faculty of Sarah Lawrence College and teaches in the Graduate Writing Program at Columbia University. Her poems "sing from the 'full catastrophe' of a woman's life: erotic life and mother love swooning in the same book, often in the same poem!...The world is richer because of it, and truer and less lonely" (Marie Howe).

October 14, 2008:

• Mary Gordon's most recent novel, Pearl, was published in January 2005 by Pantheon Books. Her previous novels—Final Payments, The Company of Women, Men and Angels, The Other Side, and Spending—have been bestsellers.  She has also written two critically-acclaimed memoirs, The Shadow Man, about her father and, most recently, Circling My Mother.  In addition, she has published a book of novellas, The Rest of Life; two collections of stories, Temporary Shelter and The Stories of Mary Gordon, which won The Story Prize in 2007; two books of essays, Good Boys and Dead Girls and Seeing Through Places; and has written a biography of Joan of Arc.  Mary has received the Lila Acheson Wallace Reader’s Digest Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Academy Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, to which she was inducted as a member in 2007.  For three years (1983, 1997, and 2000), she was the recipient of the O. Henry Award for best short story.  In March, 2008, she was named the official New York State Author and was awarded the Edith Wharton Citation of Merit for Fiction.  Mary is McIntosh Professor of English at Barnard College.
   
• Sigrid Nunez has published five novels, including A Feather on the Breath of God, For Rouenna and, most recently, The Last of Her Kind. She has also contributed stories and articles to various journals such as The New York Times, The Believer, Harper’s, and O: The Oprah Magazine.
  
  Nunez’s work has been included in several anthologies, including two Pushcart Prize volumes. Among other honors she has received are a Whiting Writer’s Award, the Rome Prize in Literature, a Berlin Prize Fellowship, and a Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Further information can be found at the author’s Web site: www.sigridnunez.com.
   

April 14, 2008:

• Aaron Hamburger
• Eliza Minot

April TBA, 2008:

• TBA. 

For more information on Women Poets at Barnard, contact its Director, Prof. Saskia Hamilton, at shamilton(at)barnard(dot)edu,