Jim Crace

Anthony Giardina

Visiting professors of the Michener Center for Writers‘ (MCW) this fall, Jim Crace and Anthony Giardina, will give a reading at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, December 3, 2009 at the Avaya Auditorium, ACES building 2.302, on campus.

English novelist Crace, whose archive the Harry Ransom Center acquired this past year, has been twice shortlisted for the distinguished Man Booker Prize in Fiction, for his novels “Quarantine” and “Being Dead.”  His other novels include “The Pesthouse,” “Arcadia,” “Continent,” “The Gift of Stones” and “Archipelago,” forthcoming in 2011.  Recognized with the E.M. Forster Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Italy’s Premio Antico Fattore prize, and the International GAP Award, he is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Giardina is a novelist, short story writer, essayist and playwright from Massachusetts who teaches regularly for the MCW.  His four novels include “White Guys” and “Recent History.” His stories and articles appear frequently in Harper’s, Esquire, GQ, and The New York Times Magazine, and can be heard on NPR.  His plays have been produced at Yale Rep, Manhattan Theatre Club, Arena Stage, Playwrights Horizon, and Long Wharf.

The reading is free and open to the public.  The ACES building is on the southeast corner of 24th Street and Speedway on campus and parking is available in the garage on San Jacinto just north of 24th Street.

More than 200 writers will showcase their books, including a host of authors from our university. Some of the presenters include:

Author: Jeffrey Abramson, professor of law and government
Book: “Minerva’s Owl: The Tradition of Western Political Thought”
When: Saturday, Oct. 31
Where: Texas State Capitol: Capitol Extension Room E2.028

Author: Oscar Casares, assistant professor of English
Book: “Amigoland”
When: Saturday, Oct. 31
Where: Texas State Capitol: Capitol Extension Room E2.016

Author: Jacqueline Jones, the Walter Prescott Webb Chair in History and Ideas and Mastin Gentry White Professor in Southern History
Book: “Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War”
When: Saturday, Oct. 31
Where: Texas State Capitol Extension Room E2.028

Author: Kate Brooks, director of Liberal Arts Career Services
Book: “You Majored in What?: Mapping Your Path from Chaos to Career”
When: Sunday, Nov. 1
Where: Lifestyle Tent (10th and Congress)

Author: Lucas A. Powe, Jr., professor of law and government
Book: “The Supreme Court and the American Elite”
When: Sunday, Nov. 1
Where: Texas State Capitol: Capitol Extension Room E2.016

Author: Elizabeth Engelhardt, associate professor of American Studies
Book: “Republic of Barbecue: Stories Beyond the Brisket”
When: Sunday, Nov. 1
Where: Cooking Tent

Author: Mark Weston, UT Law alumnus (moderated by ShelfLife@Texas contributor Laura Castro)
Book: “Prophets & Princes: Saudi Arabia from Muhammad to the Present”
When: Sunday, Nov. 1
Where: Texas State Capitol: Capitol Extension Room E2.014

The Texas Book Festival was founded in 1995 by former first lady Laura Bush to promote reading and honor Texas authors. Sessions are free and open to the public. Proceeds from books purchased at the festival benefit the state’s public libraries.

Visit this site for a full list of festival authors.

McGarity is the Joe R. & Teresa Lozano Long Endowed Chair in Administrative Law, and Wagner, is the Joe A. Worsham Centennial Professor in Law at The University of Texas at Austin. Their book was published by Harvard University Press.

The awards are the highest honor of literary achievement given to published authors at The University of Texas at Austin. They are sponsored by the University Co-operative Society.

Michael Granof, chairperson of the Co-operative Society, hosted the event and announced the winners. Victoria Rodriguez, vice provost and dean of Graduate Studies at The University of Texas at Austin, presented the awards.

Four faculty members received $3,000 prizes for their books. They were:

• Jacqueline Jones, the Walter Prescott Webb Chair in History and Ideas and Mastin Gentry White Professor in Southern History, “Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War” (A. A. Knopf, 2008).

• Peter MacNeilage, professor of psychology, “The Origin of Speech” (Oxford University Press, 2008).

• Tracie Matysik, associate professor of history, “Reforming the Moral Subject: Ethics and Sexuality in Central Europe, 1890-1930” (Cornell University Press, 2009).

• Karen Rascati, the Stewart Turley/Eckerd Corporation Centennial Endowed Professor in Pharmacy, “Essentials of Pharmacoeconomics” (Lippincott Williams and Wilkins, 2008).

The University Co-op is a not-for-profit corporation owned by the students, faculty and staff of The University of Texas at Austin. Since the year 2000, the University Co-op has given more than $28 million in gifts and rebates.

Martínez, an assistant professor in the Department of History, will present a talk on the process of writing and publishing his new book at The University of Texas History of Science Colloquium from noon to 2 p.m., Friday, Oct. 16, in GAR 1.102.

Whereas various historians have studied the origins of Einstein’s theory in relation to optics, electricity, and magnetism, none had analyzed its roots in the context of kinematics- the science of motion. Martínez explains that the book is the product of 15 years of research. “By contrast to works that are thick on conjectures, I worked to assemble the most extensive collection of documentary sources and to compose a ‘mosaic’ account of Einstein’s path to relativity.”

The cover of the book uses artwork designed by the author. “Basically, in Bern on 1905, early on a May morning, Einstein woke up with a breakthrough idea: events that are simultaneous to one observer might not be simultaneous to another,” Martínez says. “He analyzed this notion by asking himself, how would we know whether lightning bolts strike distant places at the same time? This question led him to the relativity of time.” Accordingly, the cover of Martínez’s book illustrates that imaginary view: it shows an early morning view of the Swiss capital, Bern, with two lightning bolts striking at once.

Laughs and enjoyment seem to be two key aspects of writing novels for Sarah Bird and they were plentiful on Thursday night (10/8/09) as Bird was welcomed as the next Dobie Paisano Fellow during an event in her honor on The University of Texas at Austin campus.  Bird will hold the Ralph A. Johnston fellowship for established writers during her time on the Paisano ranch.

Bird enchanted the audience with witty tales of her younger self (who would be insanely jealous of her new fellowship), excerpts from her writing (including channeling her “Zen Mama” to deal with a teenage child) and stories from the front lines of Houston high society.

A columnist for Texas Monthly and the author of seven novels, Bird’s writing career has won her many awards and accolades.  These include the Elle Magazine Reader’s Prize, Amazon’s Fiction and Literature Editors and the American Library Association’s Booklist Editors Best Book of the Year and the Texas Institute of Letters’s Award for Best Work of Fiction (twice) among others.

Becoming an author was not Bird’s dream as a little girl.  As the child of a military family, much of her youth was spent oversees with little exposure to writers.  She says,

“The idea of being a writer never crossed my mind until I discovered a form so, hmmm, let’s say, ‘approachable,’ that it occurred to me that human beings might be producing it rather than the gods who wrote the books I loved.  This form was the photo-romance.  I discovered the photo-romance when I was an au pair in France.  Ostensibly, I was in France learning French.  Actually, I was fleeing a very bad love affair.  In any case, I was a 20-year-old nitwit and the only person whose French was worse than mine was the three-month-old bebe I was taking care.  So I started buying photo-romances as a shy person’s way of learning the colloquial language.

When I returned home, I sought out a comparable market in the United States and discovered true confession magazines.. ..These publications allowed me to learn how to tell a story in a voice that was not my own, to sink deeply into a character and her world, but, most importantly, since these ‘confessions’ were all anonymous, they allowed me to simply learn how to fill up pages with no thought whatsoever that they would ever be associated with me.”

As she has clearly learned how to do more than “fill up pages,” Bird still expressed “utter delight and astonishment” upon learning that she was chosen for the fellowship.  The last time she applied for a fellowship more than 25 years ago, (the Paisano fellowship, as a matter of fact) she was turned down.  She says it took this long to get up the nerve to apply again.  That might also have to do with the fact that her friend Terry Galloway, who did win the fellowship that year, tried to make her feel better by extolling the more rustic virtues of the ranch – including rattlesnakes and scorpions.

Bird, who will live on the ranch with her “Texas boy” husband, is undaunted by the critters and is looking forward to the proximity to nature as she works on a rewrite of her next novel for her publisher, Alfred A. Knopf.

Several Poe-centric online features were unveiled:

• View a video preview of “From Out That Shadow: The Life and Legacy of Edgar Allan Poe.”

• Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Raven” has been one of his most popular poems since its publication in 1845 in the New York Evening Mirror newspaper. This popularity has led to a number of parodies, or humorous imitations, of the poem. Visit the Poe Project website and compose your own parody of “The Raven,” and you’ll be entered in a drawing to win Poe-centric prizes.

• Visit the Ransom Center’s Flickr page to see behind-the-scenes photos of curators and Exhibition Services staff members preparing the galleries and to get a peek at some of the items in the Poe exhibition.

• Poe was so captivated by cryptography that he incorporated it into his story “The Gold-Bug” in 1843. Learn more about how to solve cryptographs, and then practice your decoding skills.

• The Ransom Center has launched the Poe digital collection, where online visitors have the opportunity to see more than 4,000 images of collection and exhibition items, ranging from manuscripts in Poe’s meticulous hand to his annotated copies of the “Tales and Poems” and “Eureka.”

Variously described as narrative, experimental, Southern, deeply personal, and fiercely political, Wright credits her roots in the Arkansas Ozarks for her resistance to joining a single, identifying “ism” of the poetry world—she was born to a stubborn independence.  And the breadth of her range is as great as the remove between her home state and her adopted one, Rhode Island, where she has taught for more than 25 years at Brown University.

Wright is on The University of Texas at Austin campus for two weeks as the current Michener Residency Award Author, conducting a workshop with poetry MFA candidates of the Michener Center for Writers.  Her visit will conclude with a public reading of her own work on Thursday, September 24.

Recognized with fellowship support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bunting Institute, and the Guggenheim Foundation, a MacArthur “genius” grant, a Whiting Award, and a Lannan Literary Award, Wright’s work includes the book-length poem “Deepstep Come Shining;” a collaboration with photographer Deborah Luster on inmates in the Louisiana Prison system,” One Big Self;” and her own quirky ars poetica “Cooling Time:  An American Poetry Vigil.”

This year, her newest book, “Rising, Falling, Hovering,” won the 2009 Griffin Poetry International Prize. The judges citation calls it a “red-hot political epic . . . poetry as white phosphorus, written with merciless love and depthless anger.  ’Rising, Falling, Hovering’ is about conflict, local and global, and how failures of the heart bring disaster on every scale.”

She will read at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, September 24 at the Avaya Auditorium, ACE 2.302, on the southeast corner of 24th Street and Speedway on campus.

]]> http://www.utexas.edu/opa/blogs/shelflife/2009/09/22/poet-c-d-wright-visits-ut-campus/feed/ 0 http://www.utexas.edu/opa/blogs/shelflife/2009/09/15/ut-alum-reads-at-bookpeople-from-debut-novel/ http://www.utexas.edu/opa/blogs/shelflife/2009/09/15/ut-alum-reads-at-bookpeople-from-debut-novel/#comments Tue, 15 Sep 2009 18:47:01 +0000 Marla Akin http://www.utexas.edu/opa/blogs/shelflife/?p=3148

Author photo by E. McCourt

James Hannahan, a 2006 alumnus of The University of Texas at Austin’s Michener Center for Writers’ MFA program, will read at BookPeople  from his debut novel “God Says No,” which was published this summer by McSweeney’s Books. The reading will begin at 7 p.m., September 16.

Hannaham completed his bachlor’s degree at Yale University and was a culture reporter for the Village Voice and other New York publications before joining the MFA program. Since graduation, he’s been a staff writer for…

Author photo by E. McCourt

James Hannahan, a 2006 alumnus of The University of Texas at Austin’s Michener Center for Writers’ MFA program, will read at BookPeople  from his debut novel “God Says No,” which was published this summer by McSweeney’s Books. The reading will begin at 7 p.m., September 16.

Hannaham completed his bachlor’s degree at Yale University and was a culture reporter for the Village Voice and other New York publications before joining the MFA program. Since graduation, he’s been a staff writer for Salon.com and creative writing instructor at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

Hannaham tackles difficult terrain for any novelist—particularly a first-time author—in telling the story of a closeted gay black man who struggles in a cycle of guilt, denial and self-loathing as he tries to live by the tenets of his Southern Christian upbringing, honor his marriage vows—to a woman he truly loves as his closest friend—and accept himself for who he is.  ”Hannaham forces us to consider how important intimacy is, and how difficult . . . .   Irrespective of sexual orientation, he demonstrates the destructive forces of silences and shame on our families and romantic partnerships,” says a review in TheDefenders.com.  Numerous scandals involving very public figures reveal the kind of double lives led by men like Hannaham’s protagonist, but the subject is one that has “hardly been touched by literary fiction,” says author Jennifer Egan, who calls Hannaham “a groundbreaking new American voice.”

BookPeople is on the corner of West 6th Street and N. Lamar.

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What is a quinceañera?  In the Hispanic culture, it’s a girl’s 15th birthday party, a coming-of-age celebration much like a sweet sixteen, but with much deeper religious and social significance.  Belinda, who was born in Nebraska to a mother from South Texas and a father from Northern Mexico, had never attended one before she signed the book contract.  She threw herself into researching the ritual, attending quinceañeras, going to trade shows, talking to other Latinas about their experiences, and reading such books as Julia Alvarez’s “Once Upon a Quinceañera: Coming of Age in the USA.”

The result is a book that smartly and deftly explores questions of family relationships as well as cultural identity.  Acosta, who regularly reviews TV and other media in her weekly column, found inspiration in such shows as the hit OC, which combines story lines of teenaged characters with those of adult characters and appeals to viewers of widely differing ages.

Set in San Antonio, Texas, the novel tells the story of Ana Ruiz, a working professional and mother of 14-year-old  Carmen. Carmen blames her mother for their father’s recent abandonment of the family, and Ana plans the party as a means to reconnect with her angry daughter, but things go terribly awry. Author Joy Castro lauds Acosta’s deft portrayal of the “psychological tensions that the quinceañera moment provokes in mothers who are forced . . . to face their own aging at exactly the moment they’re supposed to be celebrating their daughters’ beauty and maturity.”  Belinda seamlessly weaves Spanish and Spanglish into her prose, giving the novel a lively and authentic voice.

In addition to her column and freelance reviews, Acosta is also a playwright and essayist whose work has appeared in Poets and Writers and aired on Latino USA.

A book release party is planned on August 18th at Cuba Libra (409 Colorado) from 6 to 8 p.m.—complete with cocktails, cupcakes and dancing, a sort of belated quinceañera for Acosta herself.  On August 25, she will read and book sign at 7 p.m. at BookPeople, on the corner of West 6th and N. Lamar.

Even before its official release on August 10th, Oscar Casares’ novel, “Amigoland,” is following in the footsteps of his acclaimed 2003 debut, “Brownsville.” Both Kirkus and Publishers Weekly gave the novel starred reviews, and USA Today and Time Out New York included it on their recommended summer reading lists even before it was in print. Harper’s and The Wall Street Journal, among others, have upcoming reviews and Texas Monthly has excerpted the novel in its August issue.  A state-wide tour is scheduled in bookstores, on campuses, and at literary festivals throughout the fall.

Austin’s BookPeople will host a reading by Casares and a book signing at 7 p.m., Thursday, August 13.

Casares joined fiction faculty of the Department of English and the Michener Center for Writers in 2004 after “Brownsville’s” publication to critical acclaim.  Reviewers agreed that his collected stories had captured the unique Tex Mex culture of his hometown and the ordinary joys and sorrows of his characters without reducing them to socioeconomic stereotypes or writing “message” fiction. The New York Times said “with quiet mastery of the smallest detail, Casares puts us on neighborly terms with the locals.”

“Amigoland,” set on the South Texas border with Mexico, is the story of estranged brothers Don Fidencio Rosales—querulous, nearly 92 years old, and living in a nursing home—and Don Celestino, twenty years his junior and newly widowed, who finds himself somewhat ambivalently involved with his young cleaning woman, Socorro. The housekeeper is a catalyst for the brothers reconnecting, and the improbable trio takes off on a bus trip into Mexico, where the siblings hope to settle a long-standing dispute about how their grandfather arrived in the U.S. and Socorro hopes to find clarity in her unlikely romance. The trip stirs up powerful issues of family and pride and about how we care for the people we love.

BookPeople is on the corner of West 6th Street and North Lamar Blvd.