Recent alumni of the New York University Graduate Creative Writing Program will read from their works on Friday, March 23, at 7 p.m. at 19 University Place, 1st floor auditorium (at 8th Street). A featured event in the NYU Creative Writing Program Spring Reading Series, the reading is free and open to the public. For more information, call 212.998.8816.
Featured are Jacqueline Bishop, Natalie Danford, Matt Donovan, Kathleen Graber, and Tyehimba Jess.
Jacqueline Bishop, born and raised in Jamaica, has had her prize-winning short stories and poems published in such magazines and journals as Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, and Renaissance Noire. She is the author of Fauna and My Mother Who is Me: Life Stories of Jamaican Women in New York. The founding editor of Calabash: A Journal of Caribbean Arts and Letters, Bishop teaches writing at NYU.
Natalie Danford is series co-editor for Best New American Voices, an annual anthology that showcases emerging writers of fiction. Her first novel, Inheritance, was published by St. Martin’s in 2007. Her articles and reviews have appeared in People, Health, Paste, Salon, and The L.A. Times, among other publications.
Matt Donovan is the winner of the 2006 Katharine Bakeless Nason Prize for poetry, selected by Mark Doty and awarded by Middlebury College and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He is currently an assistant professor of creative writing at the College of Santa Fe, and his debut poetry collection, Vellum, will appear this spring.
Kathleen Graber won the 2005 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize for her first book of poetry, Correspondence. She is the recipient of fellowships from the NJ State Council on the Arts and the Rona Jaffe Foundation, and her work has appeared in Painted Bride Quarterly, Washington Square, Ploughshares, and Green Mountains Review.
Tyehimba Jess was recognized as one of 2005’s 18 debut poets to watch by Poets and Writers magazine. His books include African American Pride: Celebrating our Achievements, Contributions, and Enduring Legacy and leadbelly: poems, which was voted one of the three best poetry books of 2005 by Black Issues Book Review and which was winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series.
The next event in the Reading Series - the Goldwater Writing Project Benefit Reading — takes place on April 5 and honors Russell Banks.
The NYU Creative Writing Program, with permanent faculty members E.L. Doctorow, Paule Marshall, Breyten Breytenbach, Philip Levine, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Sharon Olds, has distinguished itself for over three decades as a leading national center for the study of literature and writing. The director of the program is Deborah Landau. The Reading Series, sponsored in cooperation with the NYU Book Centers and with the generous support of Robert E. Holmes, is a vital component of the Writing Program, bringing both established and new writers to NYU.