Beck Lecture Series - Fall 2008

Visiting Writers

Dick Davis, Poet & Translator

September 10, 2008 · 8:00 p.m.
Barney-Davis Board Room
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V. V. Ganeshananthan, Fiction Writer & Journalist

October 2, 2008 · 8:00 p.m.
Barney-Davis Board Room
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Ander Monson, GLCA · Creative Nonfiction Winner

October 30, 2008 · 8:00 p.m.
Barney-Davis Board Room
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Mark Halliday, Poet & Critic

November 10, 2008 · 8:00 p.m.
Barney-Davis Board Room
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Biographies

Dick Davis was born in Portsmouth, England, in 1945, and educated at the universities of Cambridge (B.A. and M.A. in English Literature) and Manchester (PhD. in Medieval Persian Literature). He is currently Professor of Persian and Chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures and Ohio State University. As author, translator or editor, he has produced over 20 books; as well as academic works he has published translations from Italian (prose) and Persian (prose and verse) and eight books of his own poetry. His second book of poems received the Heinemann Award of the Royal Society of Literature, and he was elected a fellow of the Society in 1081; the British edition of his selected poems was chosen as "Book of the Year" by The Times (London) and The Daily Telegraph (London), and the American edition received the Ingram Merrill Award. A later book of poems Belonging (2002) was selected as "Poetry Book of the Year" in The Economist. His most recent book of poems is A Trick of Sunlight (2007), and his most recent book length verse translation from Persian is of the 11th century romance Vis and Ramin (2008), one of the most beatiful of all Persian narrative poems.

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Vasugi V. Ganeshananthan, a fiction writer and journalist, lives in New York . She is a 2002 graduate of Harvard College . In 2005, she received an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and in 2005-2006, she was the Bennett Fellow and writer-in-residence at Phillips Exeter Academy . In 2007, she graduated from the new MA program at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, where she was a Bollinger Fellow specializing in Arts & Culture journalism. She has written and reported for The Atlantic Monthly, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Sepia Mutiny, and The American Prospect, among others. She is the vice president of the South Asian Journalists Association and a member of the graduate board of The Harvard Crimson. This fall, she will be a writer-in-residence at Skidmore College . Random House published her first novel, Love Marriage, in April.

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Ander Monson is the author of the novel Other Electricities and the poetry collection Vacationland. He lives in Michigan and edits the magazine DIAGRAM and the New Michigan Press. Visit his web site at www.otherelectricities.com/neckdeep.

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Born in 1949, Mark Halliday earned his B.A. at Brown University in 1971, an M.A. in creative writing at Brown in 1976, and a Ph.D. in English Literature at Brandeis University in 1983. He has taught English at two high schools and five colleges; since 1996 he has taught at Ohio University in the creative writing program. His books of poems are: Little Star (William Morrow, 1987, a National Poetry Series selection), Tasker Street (University of Massachusetts Press, 1992, winner of the Juniper Prize), Selfwolf (University of Chicago Press, 1999), and Jab (University of Chicago Press, 2002). His book on Wallace Stevens, Stevens and the Interpersonal, was published by Princeton University Press in 1991. Also in 1991 Johns Hopkins University Press published The Sighted Singer, a book on poetics co-authored by Allen Grossman and Halliday. Halliday has published essays on the poetry of Claire Bateman, Anne Carson, Joshua Clover, Carl Dennis, Wayne Dodd, Kenneth Fearing, Allen Grossman, August Kleinzahler, David Kirby, Kenneth Koch, Michael Laskey, Larry Levis, Mary Ruefle, Stevie Smith, and James Tate. In 1998-2000 Halliday held a Lila Wallace/Reader’s Digest Foundation Writer’s Award. In 2001-2002 Halliday lived at the American Academy in Rome as a winner of the Rome Prize of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2006 he won a Guggenheim Fellowship.