Beck Lecture Series Fall 2012
***Home Series***
Pam Houston ‘83
**Fiction Writer**
September 19, 2012
8:00 p.m.
Herrick Hall Auditorium
Carl Phillips
**Poet**
October 8, 2012
8:00 p.m.
Barney-Davis Board Room
***Spectrum Series***
Edwidge Danticat
**Fiction Writer**
October 25, 2012
8:00 p.m.
Slayter Hall Auditorium
Co-sponsored by the Beck Lecture Series
G. C. Waldrep
**Poet**
November 6, 2012
8:00 p.m.
Barney-Davis Board Room
Lee Smith
**Fiction Writer**
November 27, 2012
4:30 p.m.
Barney-Davis Board Room
Pam Houston '83 is the author of two collections of linked short stories, Cowboys Are My Weakness (1994), winner of the 1993 Western States Book Award and has been translated into nine languages, and Waltzing the Cat (1999), which won the Willa Award for Contemporary Fiction; two novels, Contents May Have Shifted (2012); and Sight Hound (2006); and two collections of autobiographical essays, A Rough Guide to the Heart (Virago, 2001) and A Little More About Me (1999). Houston has also edited a collection of fiction, nonfiction and poetry entitled Women on Hunting: Essays, Fiction, and Poetry. She is the author of a stage play called "Tracking the Pleiades," and she has written the text for Men Before Ten a.m., a book of photographs by the French photographer Veronique Vialle. Houston is the Director of Creative Writing at UC Davis, and was the Director of the Tomales Bay Workshops. She teaches at many summer writers' conferences and festivals in the U.S. and abroad.
Carl Phillips is the author of 12 books of poetry, including Silverchest, forthcoming from FSG in 2013, and Double Shadow, winner of the 2011 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He has also written a book of prose, Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Life and Art of Poetry, and translated Sophocles's Philoctetes. Phillips teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.
Edwidge Danticat was born in Haiti in 1969, and was raised by her aunt under the dictatorial Duvalier regime until she was reunited with her parents and brothers in America when she was 12. She holds a degree in literature from Barnard College and an MFA from Brown University. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker and many anthologies. She is the co-author, with filmmaker Jonathan Demme, of two books on Haitian
art: Islands on Fire and Odillon Pieree: Haitian Artist (Kaliko Press). She was associate producer, with Jonathan Demme, on a documentary about Haiti called THE AGRONOMIST. Among other books, she is the author of Brother, I’m Dying, which is a non-fiction account of the deaths of her father and her uncle. This book was nominated for a National Book Award. She was the guest editor for the Best American Essays 2011 and the editor of Haiti Noir. Her latest book is Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work. Danticat recently received the 2011 Harold Washington Literary Award in Chicago and was the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation ‘Genius’ Grant in 2009. Danticat is working on a story collection tentatively titled Claire of the Sea-Light, which will be published by Knopf in 2012.
G.C. Waldrep's latest collections are Archicembalo (2009), winner of the Dorset Prize, and Your Father on the Train of Ghosts (2011), a collaboration with the poet John Gallaher. He lives in Lewisburg, Pa., where he teaches at Bucknell University, edits the journal West Branch, and serves as Editor-at-Large for The Kenyon Review."
Lee Smith is the author of 15 works of fiction including Oral History, Fair and Tender Ladies, and her recent collection, Mrs.Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger. Her novel The Last Girls was a 2002 New York Times bestseller as well as winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award. A retired professor of English at North Carolina State University, she has received many awards including the North Carolina Award for Literature; and an Academy Award in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
