READINGS BY RONA JAFFE FOUNDATION WRITERS' AWARD WINNERS OPEN NYU CREATIVE WRITING FALL SERIES, OCT. 1

baj1@nyu.edu

New York University's Creative Writing Program will open its Fall Reading Series by hosting six women writers, recipients of the 2004 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Awards, who will read from their works on Friday, October 1, 7 p.m., at NYU's Glucksman Ireland House, One Washington Mews (at Fifth Avenue). The event is free and open to the public; for further information the public may call 212-998-8816.

The women writers featured in this event are:

• Carin Clevidence (fiction) of Brookhaven, NY, who holds a B.A. from Colby College and an M.F.A. from the University of Michigan. Early in her career, her short story "The Somnambulists" appeared in Story Magazine, and she received a fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in 1997-98. She is finishing a short story collection and working on a novel set on Long Island at the time of the 1938 hurricane.
  
• Ann Harleman (fiction) of Providence, Rhode Island, is an adjunct professor of English at the Rhode Island School of Design and a visiting scholar at Brown University. She has published a collection of stories, Happiness (University of Iowa Press, 1994) and a novel, Bitter Lake (Southern Methodist University Press, 1996). She has been awarded a month's residency this fall at the Bogliasco Foundation in Italy where she will work on a novel, tentatively entitled Thoreau's Laundry.
  
• Dana Levin (poetry) of Santa Fe, New Mexico, had her first book, In the Surgical Theatre, published by American Poetry Review/Copper Canyon Press in 1999, which will bring out her new collection of poetry, Wedding Day, in 2005. She is the Director of the Creative Writing Program at the College of Santa Fe. She is working on a new collection of poems, School of Flesh. She is the director of the Creative Writing Program at the College of Santa Fe.
  
• Michele Morano (nonfiction) of Chicago is an assistant professor of English at DePaul University. She is currently finishing her first book, Grammar Lessons, a collection of personal essays forthcoming from Sightline Books. Her essays have appeared in The Georgia Review, Fourth Genre and Crab Orchard Review, and she is working on a second collection of essays, The FunMachine and Other Essays, about her childhood.
  
• Tracy K. Smith (poetry) of Brooklyn, NY, is an instructor of English at Medgar Evers College of the City University of New York. A graduate of Harvard and Columbia, she was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford. She won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for The Body's Question, her first collection, which was published by Graywolf Press in 2003. Currently she is working on a second book, Duende, which contemplates various folk traditions and the people who keep them alive.
  
• Sharon Strange (poetry) of Atlanta, Georgia, was educated at Harvard and Sarah Lawrence and is currently an instructor in English and creative writing at Spelman College. Her first book of poetry, Ash, received the Barnard New Women Poets Prize and was published by Beacon Press in 2001. Strange is working on a second collection of poems that focuses on the themes of "origins" and "eros," especially as they relate to black women's history and experience in the American South.

The Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Awards program was created by writer Rona Jaffe "to identify and support women writers of exceptional talent in the early stages of their writing careers." Grants of $10,000 are given to writers of fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry to make writing time available and for such specific purposes as child care, research, and related travel costs. A selection committee reviews nominations from appointed writers, editors, and scholars from across the country. The selectors and nominators serve anonymously. Direct applications and unsolicited nominations are not accepted by the Foundation. Rona Jaffe established The Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Awards program in 1995. Now celebrating its tenth anniversary year, the Foundation has awarded grants to 68 women. It is the only national literary awards program dedicated to supporting women writers exclusively.

The NYU Creative Writing Program, with permanent faculty members E.L. Doctorow, Galway Kinnell, Paule Marshall, and Sharon Olds, has distinguished itself for over two decades as a leading national center for the study of literature and writing. The Creative Writing Program Director is Melissa Hammerle. The Reading Series, sponsored in cooperation with the NYU Book Centers and the Fales Collection at NYU, is a vital component of the Writing Program, bringing both established and new writers to NYU.

The NYU Creative Writing Program Reading Series is made possible by generous support from the Lila Acheson Wallace Theater Fund, established in The New York Community Trust by the founders of the Reader's Digest Association.

09/13/04