Writers Read 2008-09
Writers Read, sponsored by the language and literature department, is a special dinner event featuring authors who read from and comment on their work. Writers Read evenings begin at 5:30 p.m. in Martin Chapel.
Please contact the department of language & literature for tickets at (540) 432-4168 or via email at langlit@emu.edu.
Sept. 18, 2008
Ervin Stutzman
preacher, professor and author, vice president and dean of Eastern Mennonite Seminary
Dr. Stutzman is a writer, speaker and a theological educator. He is a vice president at Eastern Mennonite University and serves as Dean and Professor of Church Ministries at Eastern Mennonite Seminary.
Stutzman was born into an Amish home as a twin in Kalona, Iowa. Two of his books - Tobias of the Amish and Emma - relate to his family of origin.
A third book is entitled Welcome! It is a guide to welcoming new members into the church. (Source: www.ervinstutzman.com)
Oct. 23, 2008
Maggie Anderson
poet, director of Wick Poetry Program, Kent State University
(photo by Herb Ascherman)
Anderson is the author of four books of poems, most recently Windfall: New and Selected Poems published in 2000. Her other books include Cold Comfort (1986) and A Space Filled with Moving (1992).
Anderson is also the editor of the new and selected poems of Louise McNeill and co-editor of Learning by Heart: Contemporary American Poetry about School and A Gathering of Poets, an anthology of poems read to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the shootings of students in an anti-war protest at Kent State University in 1970. Recent poems have been published in The Alaska Quarterly, The Georgia Review, and The American Poetry Review. (Source: Kent State University website)
Jan. 22, 2009
Helon Habila
Nigerian prose fiction writer,
George Mason University
(photo by Tom Langdom)
Helon Habila was born in Nigeria in 1967. He studied literature at the University of Jos and taught at the Federal Polytechnic Bauchi, before moving to Lagos to work as a journalist. In Lagos he wrote his first novel, Waiting for an Angel, which won the Caine Prize in 2001. In 2002 he moved to England to become the African Writing Fellow at the University of East Anglia. After his fellowship he enrolled for a PhD in Creative Writing.
His writing has won many prizes including the Commonwealth Writers Prize, 2003. In 2005-2006 he was the first Chinua Achebe Fellow at Bard College in New York. He is a contributing editor to the Virginia Quarterly Review, and in 2006 he co-edited the British Council's anthology, New Writing 14. His second novel, Measuring Time, was published in February, 2007.
He currently teaches Creative Writing at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, where he lives with his wife and two children. (Source: www.helonhabila.com)
March 12, 2009
Robert Morgan
novelist, Cornell University
Robert Morgan is the author of eight books, several essays, and poems. His latest book, Boone: A Biography won The 2007 Kentucky Literary Award for Nonfiction at the 10th annual Southern Kentucky Book Fest. Boone is a top 10 selection in a critic's favorite books of 2007 by Jonathan Yardley from the Washington Post. "Robert Morgan carefully separates legend from reality in the life of the country's most famous frontiersman."
Boone has also been selected as the 2008 title for Together We Read, the annual community-based reading project of Western North Carolina. Morgan was selected as finalist for the LA Times Literary Award in the biography category.
The North Carolina Literary and Historical Association, at its annual meeting in Asheville on November 10, 2007, for which Robert Morgan was the keynote speaker, honored him with the R. Hunt Parker Award "for Significant Contributions to the Literature of North Carolina." (Source: www.robert-morgan.com)
