David Madden will be the featured author at UT’s Writers in the Library on Monday, November 12th, 7 p.m. in the Hodges Library auditorium. The reading is free and open to the public.

A novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, and critic, Madden is a prolific writer in all genres. His novels include Cassandra Singing, Bijou, The Suicide’s Wife, Abducted by Circumstance, and Sharpshooter: A Novel of the Civil War. His latest book, London Bridge in Plague and Fire, brings to life the Old London Bridge, which began construction in 1176 and was eventually dismantled in 1834. In the novel, a young poet who lives on the bridge uses his imagination to resurrect the bridge’s architect and the life of the bridge itself, which was one of the wonders of the world.

Madden has compiled and edited numerous collections of stories and is the author of academic volumes on James M. Cain, James Agee, and Carson McCullers. His stories have been reprinted in college textbooks and twice in Best American Short Stories. His best-known novel, The Suicide’s Wife, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and made into a CBS movie. He may also be familiar to students of creative writing for his Pocketful series on fiction, poetry, drama, and essays.

David Madden is a Knoxville native and a graduate of the University of Tennessee. He earned an M.A. at San Francisco State and attended Yale Drama School on a John Golden Fellowship. Writer-in-residence at Louisiana State University from 1968 to 1992, Director of the Creative Writing Program 1992-1994, Founding Director of the United States Civil War Center 1992-1999, he is now LSU Robert Penn Warren Professor of Creative Writing, Emeritus.

The author will also hold an informal Q&A session for all interested students, 3-4 p.m., Monday, November 12th, in 115 Humanities and Social Sciences Building.

Read a review of London Bridge in Plague and Fire at Chapter 16: a community of Tennessee writers, readers and passersby (brought to you by Humanities Tennessee).

Writers in the Library is sponsored by the University of Tennessee, Knoxville Libraries and the UT Creative Writing Program in association with the John C. Hodges Better English Fund. For further information contact Marilyn Kallet, Director, UT Creative Writing Program (mkallet@utk.edu), or Christopher Hebert, Writer-in-Residence, UT Libraries (chebert3@utk.edu).

Follow us at:
www.facebook.com/Writers.in.the.Library
twitter.com/utklibwriters

Internationally acclaimed poet Adam Zagajewski will read at UT’s Writers in the Library on Wednesday, October 31, at 7 p.m. in the Hodges Library auditorium. The event is free and open to the public.

Adam Zagajewski is widely considered to be one of the leading poets of Europe. Born in 1945 in Lvov, he was a major figure of the Polish New Wave literary movement of the early 1970s and of the anti-Communist Solidarity movement of the 1980s. Zagajewski is himself a survivor of history’s nightmares, and following the tragedy of 9/11, one of his poems, “Try to Praise the Mutilated World,” published in a special edition of The New Yorker, became a touchstone for our traumatized nation.

His books of poetry in English include Without End: New and Selected Poems, Unseen Hand, and most recently, Eternal Enemies. In 2004 he was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and in 2010 he was a nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

He lives in Krakow, Paris, and Chicago.

The author will also participate in an informal chat with students, 2-3 p.m., in 1210-1211 McClung Tower.

Writers in the Library is sponsored by the University of Tennessee, Knoxville Libraries and the UT Creative Writing Program in association with the John C. Hodges Better English Fund. For further information contact Marilyn Kallet, Director, UT Creative Writing Program (mkallet@utk.edu), or Christopher Hebert, Writer-in-Residence, UT Libraries (chebert3@utk.edu).

Follow us at:
www.facebook.com/Writers.in.the.Library
twitter.com/utklibwriters

Adam Johnson, author of the acclaimed new novel The Orphan Master’s Son, will read at UT’s Writers in the Library, 7 p.m., Monday, October 29, in the John C. Hodges Library auditorium. The reading is free and open to the public.

Dystopian views of the future dominate Johnson’s short stories and his first novel, Parasites Like Us. In The Orphan Master’s Son Johnson portrays the very real, nightmarish kingdom of present-day North Korea. Through the narration of Jun Do (John Doe?) and the ubiquitous loudspeakers constantly blaring propaganda, the reader is immersed in a totalitarian culture in which the state directs the very thoughts of its citizens.

Adam Johnson on The Orphan Master’s Son and his trip to North Korea:

“…[W]hen Kim Jong Il comes to power, all is strength, happiness and prosperity. It didn’t matter that the story was a complete fiction — every citizen was forced to become a character whose motivations, desires and fears were dictated by this script. The labor camps were filled with those who hadn’t played their parts, who’d spoken of deprivation instead of plenitude and the purest democracy.…Traveling to North Korea filled me with a sense that every person there, from the lowliest laborer to military leaders, had to surrender a rich private life in order to enact one pre-written by the Party. To capture this on the page, I created characters across all levels of society, from the orphan soldier to the Party leaders. And since Kim Jong Il had written the script for all of North Korea, my novel didn’t make sense without writing his role as well.” [from an amazon.com interview]

Johnson teaches creative writing at Stanford University. He received a Whiting Writers’ Award for emerging writers in 2009 and was named Debut Writer of the Year in 2002 by amazon.com. His fiction has appeared in Esquire, Harper’s, Playboy, Paris Review, Tin House and Best American Short Stories. Johnson is the author of Emporium, a short-story collection, and the novel Parasites Like Us, which won a California Book Award. His books have been translated into French, Dutch, Japanese, Catalan, German, Spanish, Italian, Hebrew, Polish, Portuguese and Serbian.

Johnson is one of the founders of Stanford’s Graphic Novel Project, which each year brings together a team of student writers and artists to create graphic novels that draw on real-world situations, often involving society’s dispossessed. GNP’s projects have featured stories of human-rights abuses, touching on issues such as rape as a weapon of war, child soldiers, and human trafficking. (Read more about comics produced by the Stanford Graphic Novel Project in The Comics Journal.)

Writers in the Library is sponsored by the University of Tennessee, Knoxville Libraries and the UT Creative Writing Program in association with the John C. Hodges Better English Fund. For further information contact Marilyn Kallet, Director, UT Creative Writing Program (mkallet@utk.edu), or Christopher Hebert, Writer-in-Residence, UT Libraries (chebert3@utk.edu).