Award-winning local authors will kick off the Spring 2017 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series on Thursday, February 9, 4:30pm, at Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium in Cornell’s Klarman Hall. The Richard Cleaveland Memorial Reading features poet and writer Alice Fulton and fiction writer Helena María Viramontes. All events in the Reading Series are free and open to the public.
Fulton's many honors include an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, the Bobbitt Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress, and fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her latest book of poems is "Barely Composed"; her most recent fiction collection is "The Nightingales of Troy." Viramontes has been named a US Artist Ford Fellow in Literature and has received the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, a Sundance Institute Fellowship, and a 2017 Bellagio Literary Arts Residency from the Rockefeller Foundation. She is the author of "Their Dogs Came with Them," a novel, and two previous works of fiction, "The Moths and Other Stories" and "Under the Feet of Jesus."
On Thursday, March 16, the Reading Series features widely acclaimed master and proponent of "weird fiction" Jeff VanderMeer. His most recent novels, the Southern Reach trilogy, explore the limits of ecology and human understanding and have been translated into over thirty languages. A movie based on his novel "Annihilation," winner of the Nebula and Shirley Jackson awards, will be released by Paramount in 2017. His nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Atlantic, Slate, Salon, and the Washington Post.
On Thursday, April 13, the Eamon McEneaney Memorial Reading brings Irish-born poet Eamon Grennan to Ithaca. His recent collections are "Out of Sight: New & Selected Poems" and "But the Body." His many awards include the Lenore Marshall Prize for his Still Life with Waterfall and the PEN award in translation for his "Selected Poems of Giacomo Leopardi." This event will take place at Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall.
The Reading Series concludes on Thursday, April 27 with poet and essayist Lisa Russ Spaar, the author and editor of over ten books of poetry and criticism, most recently "Monticello in Mind: 50 Contemporary Poems on Jefferson" and "Orexia: Poems." Her many honors include a Rona Jaffe Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize, and a Pushcart Prize. Spaar was short-listed for the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award for Excellence in Reviewing.
Unless otherwise noted, events take place on Thursdays at 4:30pm in Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium on the ground floor of Klarman Hall.
The Reading Series is sponsored by the Creative Writing Program of Cornell’s Department of English.
For more information, visit english.cornell.edu/zalaznick.
