ALL EVENTS ARE FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Tina Howe, award-winning playwright, is the author most recently of Pride's Crossing (1997), which won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play in 1998 and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Her other plays include Museums (1976), The Art of Dining (1979), Painting Churches (1983), Coastal Disturbances (1986), Approaoching Zanzibar (1988), and One Shoe Off (1992). She has received an Obie Award for Distinguished Playwriting, and an Outer Critics Circle Award in 1983, a Tony nomination for Best Play in 1987, and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature in 1993.

Black Arts and H^ip-H^op Conference
Sonia Sanchez, poet, activist, and scholar, is one of the leaders in the Black Arts Movement. She is the author of many books including the poetry volumes Like the Singing Coming Off the Drums: Love Poems (1998), and Homegirls and Handgrenades (1984), which won the American Book Award, the plays I'm Black When I'm Singing, I'm Blue When I Ain't (1982) and Black Cats Back and Uneasy Landings (1995), and several children's books. In 1998 Sanchez was nominated for both the National Book Critics Circle and the NAACP Image Awards.
Saul Williams, the supernova of the young Black poetry movement, starred in and co-wrote the move Slam, with Williams playing the part of an imprisoned street poet. Voted "Best Actor" by the Independent Film Council for that role, he will soon be starring the a new film, Slam Nation: The Sport of the Spoken Word. His poetry volumes include The Seventh Octave (1998), and She (1999).

Slam Screening
February 10
(Thursday)
7:00 p.m.
Page Hall

February 11
(Friday)
7:00 p.m.
Page Hall

Lydia Davis - is a short story writer, novelist and translator and the author of the short-story collection Almost No Memory (1997), The End of the Story (FSG, 1995), Break It Down (FSG, 1986), which won the Whiting Writers Award, Story and Other Stories (1983), and Sketches for a Life of Wassilly (1981). Davis has also translated novels, biographies, and other scholarl works form French to English. She is currently working on a translation of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. She has also received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Ingram Merrill Foundation and she lives in upstate New York.

Xue Di - is a Chinese poet and critic, and the author of three volumes of collected works and two books of poetry in Chinese. In Englsh translation he has published a full-length book, Heart Into Soil (1998) and a chapbook, Flames (1995). His work traverses the landscapes of exile, identity, and memory. A native of Beijing, he left China shortly after taking part in the 1989 demonstrations in Tiananmen Square. He has been a fellow in Brown University's "Freedom to Write" program since 1990. He has contributed to many magazines and is also known as anthologist and critic. Xue Di will read in Chinese with English translation.

John Montague and Elizabeth Wassell
John Montague, a major poet writing in the English languge today, has published over ten volumes of poetry in addition to a play, short stories, translations and criticism. His poetry volumes include The Rough Field (1972), The Dead Kingdom (1984), Mont Eagle (1989), The Love Poems (1992), Time in Armagh (1993) and Collected Poems (1995), which was nominated for the Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for Poetry. Numerous awards for his work include the Irish-American Cultural Institute's Award for Literature, the Irish Book Award for Literature (1989), and in 1989 he was named the first Ireland Professor of Poetry. His newest collection of poetry is Smashing the Piano (2000), and he at work on the first volume of his memoirs.
Elizabeth Wassell's short stories have been published in various journals. Her first novel, The Honey Plain, is a comic romance whose hero, Dermot O'Duffy, is a lecturer who specializes in love in early Irish literature. Her second novel, Sleight of Hand (1999), is a thriller in the art world of New York City, imbued with the substance abuse culture of the 1980s.

Michael Ondaatje & Linda Spalding
Best known as a novelist, Michael Ondaatje's work also encompasses memoir, poetry, and film. He is the author of The English Patient (1992), which was later made into the Academy Award-winning film, Coming Through Slaughter (1976), Running in the Family (1982), and In the Skin of Lion (1987). His poetry works includes The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, There's a Trick with a Knife I'm Learning to Do, which both won the Governor General's Award (1970 & 1980), and a collection, The Cinnamon Peeler (1992).
Linda Spalding's books include A Dark Place, The Daughters of Captain Cook, The Paper Wife, and The Lost Tribe: Birute Galdikas and the Orangutans. She has been the recipients of various grants and awards, including grants from the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council.

Nathan Englander - is the author of the short story collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges (1999). His stories explore the collision of Jewish law and tradition with secular realities, whether in Brooklyn, Tel Aviv, or Stalinist Russia. Englander recently received a Pushcart Prize for his work. Often compared to the works of I. B. Singer, his stories have appeared in Story magazine and The New Yorker.

Elmore Leonard - is a novelist and screenwriter, has received wide-spread critical acclaim for his crime fiction. He received the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award in 1992. His more than 30 novels include Be Cool (1999), the sequel to Get Shorty (1990), Cuba Libre (1998), Out of Sight (1996), Riding the Rap (1995), Pronto (1993), Rum Punch (1992), Maximum Bob (1991), Stick (1982), and LaBrava (1983) which won the Edgar Allan Poe Award.

Joanna Scott & James Longenbach
Joanna Scott is the author of five novels: Make Believe (2000), Fading, My Parmacheene Belle (1987), The Closest Possible Union (1988), Arrogance (1990), and The Manikin (1996) a 1997 Pulitzer Prize finalist, and a collection of stories, Various Antidotes (1994). She received a MacArthur Fellow (1993) at the age of 31 and a Lannan Fellow Award.
James Longenbach, poet, and critic, is the author most recently of the poetry collection Threshold (1998), which explores teh boundaries between human and spiritual existence, man and nature, parent and child. His criticism includes Modern Poetry After Modernism (1997), Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things (1991), and Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, and Modernism (1988).

James Ragan - is an award winning poet and playwright and Fulbright Professor whose books include In the Talking Hours, Womb-Weary, The Hunger Wall, Lusions and The World-Shouldering I, and the co-editor of Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Collected Poems, 1952-1990. His play productions include "Saints" and Commedia" with Raymond Burr. He was involved in the Academy Award nominee, "Number One," and worked as a screenwriter on "Last Story of the Century" starring Olympia Dukakis.

Gerald Stern - is a poet and author of This Time: New and Selected Poems (W. W. Norton, 1998), which won the National Book Award, Odd Mercy (1995); Bread Without Sugar (1992), winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize, Leaving Another Kingdom: Selected Poems (1990); Two Long Poems (1990), Lovesick (1987); Paradise Poems (1984); The Red Coal (1981), which received the Melville Caine Award from the Poetry Society of America, Lucky Life, the 1977 Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets, which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, and Rejoicings (1973).

June Jordon, best known as a poet, is also a novelist, essayist, playwright, critic, and author of children's books. Her poetry volumes include Kissing God Goodbye (1997), Haruko/Love Poems (1994), and Naming Our Destiny (1989). Her most recent publication is Affirmative Acts: Plitical Essays (1998), her 25th book. Jordon has received the Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Award, the PEN West Freedom to Write Award, and the National Association of Black Journalist Award, among many others.

Jayne Anne Phillips - is a fiction writer and author most recently of MotherKind (scheduled for release on Mother's Day 2000) about a woman whose care for her terminally ill mother coincides with the birth of her first child. She is also the author of the novels Shelter (1994), and Machine Dreams (1984), which received the New York Times Best Book citation. Her short story collections include Fast Lanes (1984), How Mickey Made It (1981), and Black Tickets (1979), which won the Sue Kaufman Award for first fiction.