The Washington College Department of English and Rose O’ Neill Literary House are teaming up this spring to bring four of the country’s most compelling fiction writers to the College and the Chestertown community as part of the Literary House & Sophie Kerr Reading Series.
Starting on Feb. 5, the semester features readings by acclaimed authors Lucy Corin, Edward P. Jones, Lidia Yuknavitch, and Rion Amilcar Scott. All readings, which are free and open to the public, will be held at the Lit House and begin at 4:30 p.m.
Feb. 5, Lucy Corin. Corin is the author of the short story collections One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses (McSweeney’s Books, 2013) and The Entire Predicament (Tin House Books, 2007), as well as the novel Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls (FC2, 2004). Her writing has appeared in American Short Fiction, Conjunctions, Harper’s Magazine, Ploughshares, Tin House, and the New American Stories anthology (Vintage Contemporaries, 2015). She was an American Academy of Arts and Letters Rome Prize winner and an NEA fellow in literature in 2016. Currently at work on a novel, The Swank Hotel, Corin has a BA from Duke University and an MFA from Brown University. A professor at the University of California, Davis, Corin teaches in the English department and creative writing program.
February 28, Edward P. Jones. Jones is the author of two collections of short stories: Lost in the City (Amistad Press, 1992), winner of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award and the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, and All Aunt Hagar’s Children (Amistad Press, 2006). Jones’s novel The Known World (Amistad Press, 2003) won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Lannan Literary Award, and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. In addition to winning the PEN/Malamud Award in 2010, Jones has received fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Jones currently teaches fiction writing at George Washington University and lives in Washington, D.C.
Top – Lucy Corin, Edward P. Jones. Bottom – Lidia Yuknavitch, Rion Amilcar Scott
On March 19, Lidia Yuknavitch. Yuknavitch is the author of national bestselling novels The Book of Joan (Harper, 2017) and The Small Backs of Children (Harper, 2015), winner of the 2016 Oregon Book Award’s Ken Kesey Award for Fiction as well as the Reader’s Choice Award, the novel Dora: A Headcase (Hawthorne Books, 2012), and a critical book on war and narrative, Allegories Of Violence (Routledge, 2000). Her widely acclaimed memoir The Chronology of Water (Hawthorne Books, 2011) was a finalist for a PEN Center USA award for creative nonfiction and winner of a PNBA Award and the Oregon Book Award Reader’s Choice. A book based on her recent TED Talk, The Misfit’s Manifesto (Simon & Schuster/TED Books), was released in October 2017. Her writing has also appeared in Guernica Magazine, Ms., The Iowa Review, Zyzzyva, Another Chicago Magazine, The Sun,Exquisite Corpse, TANK, and in the anthologies Life As We Show It: Writing on Film (City Lights Publishers, 2009), Wreckage of Reason: XXperimental Prose by Contemporary Women Writers (Spuyten Duyvil, 2008), Forms at War (FC2, 2009), Feminaissance (Les Figues Press, 2010), and RePresenting Bisexualities: Subjects and Cultures of Fluid Desire (SUNY, 1996), as well as online at The Rumpus. She founded the workshop series Corporeal Writing in Portland, Oregon, where she teaches both in person and online. She received her doctorate in Literature from the University of Oregon.
On April 11, Rion Amilcar Scott. Scott’s short story collection, Insurrections (University Press of Kentucky, 2016) was awarded the 2017 PEN/Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and the 2017 Hillsdale Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. His work has been published in journals such as The Kenyon Review, Crab Orchard Review, and The Rumpus, among others. The World Doesn’t Require You, his sophomore story collection, is forthcoming from Liveright.
Each event will be followed by a book sale and signing. For more information, see our Literary Events Brochure here: www.washcoll.edu/live/files/8293-2018-19-literary-events-brochure, or visit the Literary House website at www.washcoll.edu/centers/lithouse. More information about the Sophie Kerr Department can be found here: www.washcoll.edu/departments/english/sophie-kerr-legacy/
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Founded in 1782, Washington College is the tenth oldest college in the nation and the first chartered under the new Republic. It enrolls approximately 1,450 undergraduates from more than 39 states and territories and 25 nations. With an emphasis on hands-on, experiential learning in the arts and sciences, and more than 40 multidisciplinary areas of study, the College is home to nationally recognized academic centers in the environment, history, and writing. Learn more at washcoll.edu.
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