The School of Humanities and Sciences and the Department of Writing are pleased to present readings by three award-winning writers in the Distinguished Visiting Writers Series this semester: Guggenheim Fellow in Nonfiction Sarah Manguso, National Book Award-winning poet Mary Szybist, and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Edward P. Jones.
Manguso will kick off the DVW series with a reading from her new book, Ongoingness: The End of a Diary, at 7:30pm on Wednesday, September 9th in Clark Lounge in Campus Center. The reading is free and open to the public. A question-and-answer period and book-signing will follow.
Sarah Manguso is the author, most recently, of three book-length essays: Ongoingness, The Guardians: An Elegy for a Friend, and The Two Kinds of Decay: A Memoir. Her other books include the story collection Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape and the poetry collections Siste Viator and The Captain Lands in Paradise. Her essays have appeared in Harper’s, the New York Review of Books, and the New York Times Magazine, among other places, and her poems have won a Pushcart Prize and appeared in four editions of the Best American Poetry series. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rome Prize, she has taught writing at Columbia, Fairfield, the New School, NYU, Pratt, Princeton, and the Otis College of Art and Design. She grew up near Boston and now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where next spring she will be the Distinguished Visiting Writer at St. Mary’s College.
Of her latest book, writer David Shields said, “It seemed scarcely possible that, after The Two Kinds of Decay and The Guardians, Sarah Manguso’s work could get more urgent, but somehow it has. Ongoingness confronts the deepest processes and myths of life and death: birth, marriage, illness, mourning, motherhood, art. Underwriting this book, as is true of all of Manguso’s books, is writing itself. Or, rather, the writing is about itself in the best, most vital sense. Our author/narrator/speaker/heroine is never not asking the most fundamental question, namely, Why live? The seriousness of the inquiry gives this book extraordinary purpose, momentum, and value. I am in awe.”
For more information about the Distinguished Visiting Writers Series or to request special accommodations, contact Eleanor Henderson at 274-3324 or ehenderson@ithaca.edu. We ask that requests for accommodations be made as soon as possible.
https://www.ithaca.edu/intercom/article.php/20150901101547782