In Fall 2018 the Michener Center was honored to bring the award-winning novelist and short story writer Edward P. Jones; the Canadian poet, fiction writer, essayist, novelist, editor, and filmmaker Michael Ondaatje; playwright, activist, television writer, and novelist Kia Corthron; and National Book Award-winner, Pulitzer Prize-winner, and former United States Poet Laureate Robert Hass. Photos below.
Current MCW Screenwriter Nathan Patton has won a First Look Project contest for his screenplay Waitress #2. Congratulations, Nathan!
The New York Times has published Edward Carey’s beautiful illustrated homage to Charles Dickens.
Edward Carey is a writer and illustrator whose books include The Iremonger Trilogy: Heap House, Foulsham, and Lungdon; Observatory Mansions; and Alva & Irva: The Twins Who Saved a City. His artwork has been exhibited in Florence, Collodi, Kilkenny, Milan, London and Austin; his essays and reviews have been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Observer, Corriere della Serra, La Repubblica, and other places. In addition to his own work, he illustrates other writers, including Bill Wittliff and Jessica Frances Kane. His new novel, Little, will be published in the US and UK in October, 2018, with other countries to follow.
American Short Fiction has awarded MCW fiction faculty Elizabeth McCracken with a Gold Star for Excellence in Teaching. The award was given at ASF’s annual Stars At Night event. Congratulations, Elizabeth!
Elizabeth McCracken is the author of two short story collections, Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry and Thunderstruck; a memoir, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination; and three novels, The Giant’s House, Niagara Falls All Over Again, and Bowlaway, which will be published in February 2019. A graduate of the Writers Workshop of the University of Iowa, she has been a finalist for the National Book Award and won the 2015 Story Prize, and has received grants, fellowships, and awards from The Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the American Academy in Berlin, the National Endowment for the Arts, and other places. She holds the James Michener Chair in Fiction and is Associate Director of the New Writers Project in the U.T. Department of English.
Congratulations to Fiction Faculty Peter LaSalle who was honored with a 2018 Co-op Award for his book, Sleeping Mask: Fictions.
MCW alum sam sax has received a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship of $25,800.
Read more at Poetry Foundation.
7pm
Thursday, November 15th
Mulva Auditorium (EERC)
The Michener Center is thrilled to present a reading by Robert Hass. From 1995 to 1997, he served as Poet Laureate of the United States. He won the 2007 National Book Award and shared the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for the collection Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005. In 2014 he was awarded the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets.
The Mulva Auditorium is in the Engineering and Education Research Center (EER) 2501 Speedway, Austin, TX 78712.
This event is free and open to the public.
Don’t miss this chance to hear award-winning author Michael Ondaatje read selections from his latest novel, Warlight, which tells the dramatic story of two teenagers whose lives are changed when they are left in the care of a mysterious figure named “The Moth.” Ondaatje, who received the Golden Man Booker prize this year for his 1999 novel The English Patient, placed his archive at the Ransom Center in 2017. Containing more than 90 boxes, the archive documents his working methods and offers insight into his writing process from the 1960s to the present. Co-sponsored by the Michener Center for Writers. Line forms upon arrival of the first patron, and doors open 30 minutes in advance.
3pm on 9/9. Resident of San Antonio, Naomi Shihab Nye was a longtime visiting writer at the Michener Center for Writers and a longtime friend of the Ann Richards School for Young Women Leaders, and is a fan of many Austin writers.
She is now on faculty at Texas State University in the Creative Writing Program and also continuing her travels as visiting writer far and wide.
Her most recent book VOICES IN THE AIR – POEMS FOR LISTENERS and some poems from two forthcoming books will be featured during this poetry reading/conversation.
