Program Information
About Writers@Drew
Co-Sponsored by The Casement Fund and the English Department, the Writers@Drew reading series hosts a variety of published authors, who recite excerpts from their works for the Drew community throughout the academic year. The list of previous guest authors includes Drew alumni/ae, faculty, poets, and fiction/nonfiction writers, such as: Sean Nevin, Kathleen Graber, Courtney Zoffness, Priscilla Becker, Kevin Prufer, and William Giraldi. At the end of the Spring semester, the Drew Writing Prize winners read their award winning poetry and prose for the .
If you have any questions, please contact the Writers@Drew coordinator Patrick Phillips at pphillip@drew.edu.
List of Visiting Authors
April 23, 2013 at 7-9pm in LC-28
Angelo Nikolopoulos’ first book of poems, Obscenely Yours, is a winner of the 2011 Kinereth Gensler Award and is forthcoming from Alice James Books in April 2013. His poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2012, Best New Poets 2011, Boston Review, Fence, The Los Angeles Review, The New York Quarterly, Tin House, and elsewhere. He is a winner of the 2011 “Discovery” / Boston Review Poetry Contest and the founder of The White Swallow, a queer reading series in Manhattan. He lives in New York City. Please visit the following website for more information about Obscenely Yours.
April 18, 2013 at 4-6pm in The Space, EC
Readings by the 2013 winners of the following writing and poetry prizes:
The Academy of American Poets’ Prize
The Goin Prize in Creative Writing
The Chapman Prize in Poetry
March 21, 2013 at 4-5:30pm in The Founders Room, Mead Hall
Reza Aslan is the author of the international bestseller No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam, which has been named by Blackwell Publishers as one of the 100 most important books of the last decade. It’s now available in thirteen languages, and was re-released with new content to coincide with the tenth anniversary of 9/11. He is also the author of How to Win a Cosmic War, a contributing editor to The Daily Beast, and a member of many prominent foreign relations and policy councils. He is also the editor of two volumes: Tablet and Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East, and Muslims and Jews in America: Commonalties, Contentions, and Complexities. These literary anthologies use the arts to bridge the gap of understanding between East and West, and to strengthen Jewish and Muslim relations.
Reza Aslan appears regularly in the media, on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report among other high profile outlets. In the corporate realm, Aslan is President and CEO of Aslan Media Inc., which runs BoomGen Studios, a unique media company focused entirely on entertainment about the Greater Middle East and its Diaspora communities. He has degrees in Religion from Santa Clara University, Harvard, and UC Santa Barbara, as well as a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Iowa, where he was named the Truman Capote Fellow in Fiction. Please visit his website for more information.
February 28, 2013
David Gessner is the author of eight books, including My Green Manifesto, The Tarball Chronicles, Sick of Nature,The Prophet of Dry Hill, and Return of the Osprey, which was chosen by the Boston Globe as one of the top ten nonfiction books of the year and the Book-of-the-Month club as one of its top books of the year. The Globe called it a “classic of American Nature Writing.” In 2006 he won a Pushcart Prize; in 2007 he won the John Burroughs Award for Best Natural History Essay; and in 2008 his essay, “The Dreamer Does Not Exist,” was chosen for The Best American Nonrequired Reading. His work has appeared in many magazines and journals including The New York Times Magazine, The Boston Globe, Outside, The Georgia Review, The Harvard Review, and Orion. He has taught environmental writing at Harvard, and is currently an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, where he founded the national literary journal, Ecotone. Please visit his website for more information.
November 13, 2012
Kathleen Graber is the author of two collections of poetry, Correspondence (Saturnalia Books, 2006) and The Eternal City (Princeton University Press, 2010), which was a finalist for The National Book Award, The National Book Critics Circle Award, and the winner of The Library of Virginia Literary Award for Poetry. She is a recipient of fellowships from The Rona Jaffe Foundation, The New Jersey State Council on the Arts, The National Endowment for the Arts, and The Guggenheim Foundation. She teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Sean Nevin is the author of Oblivio Gate (Southern Illinois University Press) and A House That Falls (Slapering Hol Press). His honors include a Literature Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize for Poetry, and two fellowships from the Arizona Commission on the Arts. His poetry and interviews have recently been featured on NPR’s nationally syndicated shows ‘The Story with Dick Gordon’ and ‘Speaking of Faith’ with Krista Tippett. He directs the MFA Program in Poetry and Poetry in Translation at Drew University.
April 24, 2012
Readings by the 2012 winners of the following writing and poetry prizes:
The Academy of American Poets’ Prize
Co-Winner: Kathleen Burke
Co-Winner: John Dabrowski
Finalist: Geoffrey Edelstein
Finalist: Mallory Mortillaro
The Goin Prize in Creative Writing
Winner: John Dabrowski
Finalist: Kathleen Burke
Finalist: Dana Lenoir
The Chapman Prize in Poetry
Winner: Shandy Walton
Finalist: Melissa Caparruva
Finalist: Paul Meister
March 22, 2012
Matthew Shaer is the author of Among Righteous Men (John Wiley and Sons, 2011). He is a contributing writer at New York magazine, and a fellow with the Nation Institute’s Investigative Fund. His writing and reporting have appeared in Harper’s magazine, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy and The Los Angeles Times, among other publications. From 2006 to 2009, he was a staff reporter at The Christian Science Monitor, and before that, he was an editor at The Boston Globe. He lives in Brooklyn.
John McIntyre is the editor of Memorable Days: The Selected Letters of James Salter and Robert Phelps. His work has appeared in the American Scholar and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications.
Courtney Zoffness’ work has appeared in the Indiana Review, Washington Square, Tampa Review, Saint Ann’s Review, Redivider, The Fish Prize Stories anthology, and elsewhere, and was twice nominated for Best New American Voices. She received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and the Vermont Studio Center, was the fiction writer-in-residence at the University of Freiburg in Germany, and a Davenport College teaching fellow at Yale University in 2009 and 2011. A former journalist who served as Managing Editor of the United-Nations-sponsored Earth Times, she’s also published a variety of features and reviews in Our Town, Ladies’ Home Journal, New York’s daily Metro, and elsewhere. In addition to working at Drew, she teaches creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania.
February 22, 2012
William Giraldi is a Writer, Editor, Essayist, Drew Grad, and the author of the acclaimed novel Busy Monsters. He teaches at Boston University and is Senior Fiction Editor for AGNI. His nonfiction and fiction have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Georgia Review, Bookforum, Southern Review, The Believer, Kenyon Review, Poets & Writers, Yale Review, The American Scholar, Antioch Review, TriQuarterly, and Salmagundi. His essay on amateur bodybuilding, “Freaky Beasts,” received a Pushcart Prize and was listed among Most Notable Essays in Best American Essays 2010. His essay “The Physics of Speed” was a finalist for a 2011 National Magazine Award. Giraldi lives in Boston with his wife and son.
November 10, 2011
Priscilla Becker’s first book of poems, Internal West, won The Paris Review book prize and was published in 2003. Her poems have appeared in Fence, Open City, Boston Review, The Paris Review, Raritan, American Poetry Review, Cousin Corinne, The Brooklyn Rail, Verse, and The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets; her fiction in The Literary Review; her music reviews in The Nation and Filter magazine; her book reviews in The New York Sun; and her essays in Cabinet magazine, and Open City. Her essays have also been anthologized by Soft Skull Press, Anchor Books, and Sarabande. She teaches poetry at Pratt Institute, Columbia University, and in her apartment. Her second book, Stories That Listen, was released from Four Way Books in October 2010.
Kevin Prufer is the author of several volumes of poetry, the most recent of which are In a Beautiful Country (Four Way Books, 2011) and National Anthem (Four Way Books, 2008), named one of the five best poetry books of the year by Publishers Weekly and a finalist for The Poets Prize. He’s also Editor of, among others, Until Everything is Continuous Again: Essays on the Work of W. S. Merwin (Word Farm, 2012), New European Poets (Graywolf Press, 2008), Dunstan Thompson: on the Life & Work of a Lost American Master (Pleiades Press, 2010), and New Young American Poets (Southern Illinois University Press, 2000). The recipient of three Pushcart prizes, grants from the Lannan Foundation and the NEA, and numerous awards from the Poetry Society of America, he is Professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston and Editor-at-Large of Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing.
October 24, 2011
Jocelyn Lieu is the author of a 9/11 memoir titled What Isn’t There: Inside a Season of Change and a collection of stories, Potential Weapons. Her work has appeared in the anthologies 110 Stories: New York Writes After September 1; Charlie Chan Is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction; and The Forgotten Borough: Writers Come to Terms with Queens; as well in as journals including the Asian Pacific American Review, the Denver Quarterly, and the Hamilton Stone Review.
Patrick Phillips first book, Chattahoochee, received the 2005 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and his second, Boy, was published by the University of Georgia Press in 2008. He has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the U.S. Fulbright Commission, and his recent honors include a 2011 Pushcart Prize, and the 2011 Lyric Poetry Award from the Poetry Society of America. He lives in Brooklyn and teaches at Drew University.
Hirsh Sawhney is the editor of Delhi Noir, an anthology of fiction published by Akashic Books and Harper Collins India. Joyce Carol Oates selected his short story “A Bag For Nicholas” for her New Jersey Noir anthology. Hirsh’s writing has also appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Times Literary Supplement, The Financial Times, and The Guardian. He is an Associate Editor at Wasafiri Magazine and a Contributing Editor for The Brooklyn Rail, and is currently completing his first novel.
Jason Schneiderman is the author of Sublimation Point, a Stahlecker Selection from Four Way Books, and Striking Surface, winner of the 2009 Richard Snyder Prize from Ashland Poetry Press. His poetry and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry, Poetry London, The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, and Tin House. A graduate of the MFA program at NYU, he is completing his doctorate at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.