Here’s an event I won’t be able to attend, but since I love
the PEN/Faulkner organization so much, I’m going to post it anyway! Check out their whole series of upcoming
readings at the link below…lots of good writers coming to read.
A Storied Future: Ann
Beattie in conversation with emerging writers from the Virginia Quarterly Review
Friday, October 17, 2014
7:30 PM
Lutheran Church of the Reformation (across the street from
the Folger Shakespeare Library)
212 East Capitol Street NE
Washington, DC 20003 (map)
Tickets are now on sale for
$15. Click here to
subscribe to the PEN/Faulkner Reading Series for a discounted rate.
Since 1925, the storied literary and cultural journal, Virginia Quarterly Review, has been
publishing thought-provoking works of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and
journalism. The fall 2014 issue of VQR has a theme of “Big Breaks,” and this
collaborative event between PEN/Faulkner and VQR will feature a moderated
conversation between Ann Beattie and four gifted writers — Tope Folarin,
Onyinhe Ihezukwu, Greg Jackson, and Brendan McKennedy — at the start of their
careers.
Ann Beattie has been included in four O. Henry Award
Collections and in John Updike’s Best
American Short Stories of the Century. In 2000, she received the
PEN/Malamud Award for achievement in the short story form. In 2005, she
received the Rea Award for the Short Story. She and her husband, Lincoln Perry,
live in Key West, Florida, and Charlottesville, Virginia, where she is Edgar
Allan Poe Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of
Virginia.
Tope Folarin won the 2013 Caine Prize for African Writing
for his story “Miracles.” In 2014, he was named to the Africa 39 list of the
top African writers under 40. He is a graduate of Morehouse College and Oxford
University, where he earned two Master’s degrees as a Rhodes Scholar. Tope lives
in Washington, DC and is currently at work on his first novel.
Brendan McKennedy, a former fiction editor at the Greensboro Review, has published short
stories in Epoch, PANK, and Night Train. He’s at work on a novel set
in the American South during the early years of the recording industry. He
lives in North Carolina.
Onyinye Ihezukwu was born and raised in Nigeria, where she
worked as a journalist and broadcaster. Her work largely explores changing
socio-spiritual themes in the urban Nigerian setting. She is a Poe/Faulkner
fellow with the MFA program at the University of Virginia, where she received
the 2014 Henfield Prize.
Greg Jackson grew up in Boston and coastal Maine. He has
been a Fiction Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center and a Henry Hoyns Fellow at
the University of Virginia, where he won the 2012 Henfield Prize. His fiction
has appeared in the New Yorker, and
his first book is a story collection entitled Prodigals (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016). He has worked for the
literary journal n+1 and with
investigative journalist Ron Suskind on several bestselling works of political
nonfiction.
