Visiting Writers Series

Visiting Writers Series

All readings begin at 7:30 p.m. and are free of charge, but seating is limited.
Ahmanson Hall Forum
The Otis Goldsmith Campus
9045 Lincoln Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA. 90045

 

FALL 2010 VISITING WRITERS SERIES

September 8:  Salar Abdoh

Salar Abdoh is the author of the novels The Poet Game and Opium.  His short stories, essays and translations have appeared in the New York Times, Bomb and Callaloo, and he is the recipient of NYFA and NEA awards in literature. Born and raised in Iran, he lives in New York and teaches at The City College of the City University of New York.

September 22:  Rae Armantrout and Joshua Clover

Rae Armantrout’s most recent book of poetry, Versed, won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize and the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award; it was also a finalist for the National Book Award. Her collection Next Life was a New York Times Notable Book in 2007.  Other recent books include Collected Prose, Up to Speed, The Pretext, and Veil: New and Selected Poems. Her poems have been included in numerous anthologies, including American Hybrids,  Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology, American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Language Meets the Lyric Tradition,  The Oxford Book of American Poetry, and The Best American Poetry.  Armantrout  received an award in poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in 2007 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008. She is Professor of Poetry and Poetics at UCSD.

Joshua Clover has published books on music, Bob Dylan Didn't Have This to Sing About, film, The Matrix, and two books of poetry, Madonna anno domini and The Totality for Kids.  He has won the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, two Pushcart Prizes, and been included in Best American Poetry and Best American Music Writing. In summer 2010, he inaugurated (along with frequent collaborator Juliana Spahr) the Experimental Seminar in Social Poetics, an almost-free poetry program. He is a professor of poetry and poetics at UC Davis and an editorial board member of Film Quarterly. He is currently a Fellow at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell, working on a critical study of poetry and political economy.

October 6:  OTIS BOOKS READING:  Bruce Bégout with D.J. Waldie

Otis Books is pleased to publish Bruce Bégout’s Common Place.  The American Motel.  The book includes an afterward by D.J. Waldie.  Common Place is the second work in a triology begun with Zeropolis, a broad archeological inquiry into the meanings of the quotidian urban world.  In Bégout’s essay, the American motel poetically reveals new forms of urban life, in which mobility, wandering, and poverty play a dominant role.

French philosopher and author Bruce Bégout is currently maître de conférences at the University of Bordeaux.  He has published many essays, including Zéropolis. L'expérience de Las Vegas, Lieu commun. Le motel américain, La Découverte du quotidien. Éléments pour une phénoménologie du monde de la vie and De la décence ordinaire, as well as a novel L'Éblouissement des bords de route.  He served on the editorial board of the journal Inculte, and is currently the series editor of “Matière étrangère” for Éditions Vrin.

D. J. Waldie lives in Lakewood, California and for many years worked as a city planner.  He is a contributing editor of the Los Angeles Times and a contributing writer at Los Angeles magazine.  Winner of fellowships from the NEA and the California Arts Council, as well as a Whiting Writers’ Award, he is the author of the acclaimed essay collection Holy Land.

October 20:  Tom Raworth

First published in 1966, Tom Raworth is the author of more than forty books of poetry, prose, and translations, including The Relation Ship, which won the 1969 Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize, A Serial Biography, Lion Lion, Moving (with illustrations by Joe Brainard), Back to Nature, Cloister, The Mask, Ace, Nicht Wahr, Rosie?, Lazy Left Hand, Visible Shivers, and Eternal Sections.  He is also the author of Tottering State: Selected and New Poems 1963 to 1987, Clean & Well Lit:  Selected Poems 1987 to 1995, and Collected Poems, published by Carcanet, who this year also brought out Windmills in Flames.   In 2007, Raworth was awarded the Antonio Delfini prize for lifetime achievement in Modena, Italy.
During the 1960s, Tom Raworth founded and worked at the Goliard Press and subsequently embarked on a teaching career at the University of Essex, the University of Texas, Austin, King's College, Cambridge, the University of Cape Town, UCSD, and Columbia College, Chicago.  In addition to his native Britain, Raworth has lived and worked in the United States and Mexico.  He currently resides in Brighton, England.

November 3:  Jean Thompson

Jean Thompson is the author of the recent short story collections Do Not Deny Me and Throw Like a Girl, as well as the novel City Boy.  Her collection Who Do You Love, was a 1999 finalist for the National Book Award, and the novel Wide Blue Yonder was a New York Times Notable Book and Chicago Tribune Best Fiction selection for 2002.  Her work has been published in The New Yorker and been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories.  Thompson has received fellowships from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation and taught creative writing at the University of Illinois, Champaign, Reed College, and Northwestern.  She currently lives in Urbana, Illinois.

November 17:  OTIS BOOKS Reading:  Eric Anderson and Ari Samsky

Otis Books is proud to publish The Poetics of Trespass by Eric Anderson and The Capricious Critic by Ari Samsky.

Using his Denver apartment as a central locale, Erik Anderson walked out the letters of the word pastoral between February and March 2007 for The Poetics of Trespass, navigating the various curves and corners of the city streets, and therein charting the experiences of a poet in an urban landscape.  Ari Samsky’s The Capricious Critic is a satirical look at modern society through the distorted lens of the absurd.  Part cultural anthropologist, part reluctant wayfarer, Samsky—the capricious critic—rates and reviews everything from sentient genetically modified fruit to the efficiency of subway systems.

Erik Anderson’s critical and creative work has appeared in American 
Letters & Commentary, Witness, The Laurel Review, The Poetry Project
 Newsletter, Versal, and Rain Taxi, among other publications. A former 
contributing editor at the Denver Quarterly, he co-edits the mail-art 
magazine Thuggery & Grace.  He lives
 outside of Denver.

Ari Samsky was editor-in-chief of The Nassau Weekly at Princeton, where he earned a PhD in cultural anthropology.  His research has taken him to Switzerland, France, and Tanzania. He has written short fiction and essays for several literary magazines, and he contributes regularly to the website Splice Today.  He teaches at the University of Iowa, Iowa City.

December 8:  Daniel Alarcón

Daniel Alarcón was born in Lima, Peru and currently lives in Oakland.  He has taught at Mills College and California College of Art.  His story collection, War by Candelight, was a finalist for the 2006 PEN/Hemingway Award and his novel Lost City Radio won the 2008 PEN USA Award.  Lost City Radio was translated into several languages, and the German translation won the International Literature Award from the Haus der Kulturen der Welt.  Alarcón’s fiction has been published in The New Yorker and Harper’s and his nonfiction in Salon and Eyeshoot.  He has received fellowships from the Guggehnheim and Lannan Foundations, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and is an editor of the Peruvian magazine Etiqueta Negra.