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Festival Schedule of Events
Thursday, October 20
6 PM
David Berman will read new and published works. Alachua County Public Library, 401 E. University Avenue, Gainesville.
Friday, October 21
8 PM
Amy Hempel and D.A. Powell will read new and published works. Ustler Hall Atrium, University of Florida. An informal reception will follow.
Saturday, October 22
1–3 PM
Amy Hempel, D.A. Powell, Laura Kasischke, and Kevin Young will talk about their work. Ustler Hall Atrium, University of Florida. An informal reception will follow.
8 PM
Laura Kasischke and Kevin Young will read new and published work. Ustler Hall Atrium, University of Florida.
All events are free and open to the public.
The Festival is presented by MFA@FLA, the Creative Writing Program of the Department of English of the University of Florida. For further information please contact Becca Evanhoe at <r.evanhoe@ufl.edu> or visit the MFA at Florida WWW site, at <http://www.english.ufl.edu/crw/>
Biographies of the 2011 Florida Writers’ Festival Authors
David Berman, the former frontman for the indie-rock band Silver Jews, was born in 1967 in Williamsburg, Virginia. Actual Air, his debut poetry collection, was released in 1999 by Open City Books. Poet James Tate praised the work, saying that his poems are “beautiful, strange, intelligent, and funny. They are narratives that freeze life in impossible contortions.” The New Yorker wrote that “his words have an easy, eloquent gait; each line needs to be a line. The landscapes are crisply American, and history, especially Southern history, casts a shadow.”
Amy Hempel is the author of four collections of short stories, most recently The Dog of the Marriage (2005). Her Collected Stories was released in 2006 and named one of the New York Times’ Ten Best Books of the Year. She has been the winner of the Rea Prize for the Short Story, Ambassador Award for Best Fiction of the Year, and a USA Foundation Fellowship, and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Her stories have been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, and have appeared in Harper's, Vanity Fair, The Quarterly, Playboy, GQ, and The Yale Review. Her nonfiction has appeared in Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, Bomb, Interview, and Vogue. She teaches creative writing in the MFA Program at Bennington College and at Harvard, where she is the Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Fiction.
Laura Kasischke is the author of eight collections of poetry (most recently Space, in Chains) and eight novels, two of which have been made into feature films—The Life Before Her Eyes and Suspicious River. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as several Pushcart Prizes and numerous poetry awards. Her writing has appeared in Best American Poetry, The Kenyon Review, Harper’s, and The New Republic. She teaches creative writing in the MFA program at the University of Michigan.
Kevin Young is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebellion. Jelly Roll: A Blues was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize; The Grey Album: Music, Shadows, Lies won the 2010 Graywolf Nonfiction Prize and will appear in 2012. Young is the Atticus Haygood Professor of Creative Writing and English and Curator of Literary Collections and the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University in Atlanta.
D. A. Powell’s most recent books of poetry are Chronic (2009) and Cocktails (2004). Both volumes were finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, he received the Kingsley Tufts Award in 2010. He has taught at the University of Iowa, Columbia University, Davidson College, and New England College, and served as the Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Poetry at Harvard University. He currently teaches at the University of San Francisco.