Ithaca College

 The School of Humanities and Sciences and the Department of Writing are pleased to welcome  New Yorker staff writer and award-winning nonfiction author Philip Gourevitch, fiction writer and Director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (the nation’s most prestigious graduate program In creative writing) Lan Samantha Chang, and acclaimed poet Thomas Sayers Ellis as part of this semester’s Distinguished Visiting Writers Series. They will be reading at 7:30pm on October, 25, October 16, and September 19 respectively.

Thomas Sayers Ellis is the author of The Maverick Room (2005), which won the John C. Zacharias First Book Award, and is a recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award. His second book, Skin, Inc.; Identity Repair Poems brings together lyric sequences and his own photographs in which Ellis “traverses the African-American and American literary landscapes." His poems and photographs have appeared in Best American Poetry (1997, 2001 and 2010), Grand Street, Jubilat, Tin House, Poetry, and The Nation. He is an Assistant Professor of Writing at Sarah Lawrence College. His public reading will take place at 7:30 pm on Wednesday, September 19 in Clark Lounge, Campus Center 

 Lan Samantha Chang is the Director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa--the nation's most prestigious graduate program in creative writing. Her fiction has appeared in Atlantic Monthly, Story, and The Best American Short Stories. Chang is the author of the award-winning books Hunger: a Novella and Stories, Inheritance: A Novel, and All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost. Her public reading will take place at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, October 16 in Klingenstein Lounge, Campus Center.

Philip Gourevitch is a staff writer for The New Yorker and is a former Editor-in-Chief of The Paris Review. He is the author of We Wish to inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda  (1998), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award. He is also the author of Standard Operating Procedure, a book about Abu Ghraib. In addition to The New Yorker, Gourevitch has written for Granta, Harper's, and The New York Review of Books. His public reading wil take place at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, October 25 in 102 Textor Hall.

In addition to giving a reading, all three Distinguished Visiting Writers will contribute to teaching a 1-credit master class to Ithaca College students. Individuals with disabilities requiring accommodations should contact Catherine Taylor at ctaylor@ithaca.edu. We ask that requests for accommodations be made as soon as possible.