UHV/American Book Review Reading Series announces fall 2016 authors
The 2016 University of Houston-Victoria/American Book Review Fall Reading Series, recipient of the 2016 UH System Regents Award for Academic Excellence, will present five skilled writers, including a Columbia University faculty member, a German translator and an author whose debut novel has been optioned for a film by actress and comedian Kristen Wiig.
“ABR is proud to share these amazing, talented authors from around the world with UHV and the Victoria community,” said Jeffrey Di Leo, dean of the UHV School of Arts & Sciences, and ABR editor and publisher. “I’m looking forward to hearing their readings and watching them engage with our students and community members.”
Visiting authors will read selections at noon from their poems, novels, essays and comics in the Alcorn Auditorium located inside UHV University West, 3007 N. Ben Wilson St. The auditorium has hosted 89 writers to date. The readings will begin at noon and are free and open to the public.
Authors scheduled for the UHV/ABR Fall Reading Series are:
Peter Turchi, Sept. 1 – Turchi is the author of six books of fiction and nonfiction most recently including the New York Times bestseller “A Muse and a Maze: Writing as Puzzle, Mystery, and Magic.” He also has co-edited three anthologies for writers. His writing has appeared in Tin House, The Huffington Post, Ploughshares and Story. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship, he has taught in and served as director of the Master of Fine Arts in writing programs at Warren Wilson College and Arizona State University. He currently teaches at UH.
Sam Lipsyte, Sept. 22 – Lipsyte is the author of the short story collections “Venus Drive” and “The Fun Parts,” as well as the novels “The Subject Steve,” “Home Land” and “The Ask.” Lipsyte’s fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Tin House, Open City, N + 1, McSweeney’s and Best American Short Stories. He is the winner of the Believer Book Award, was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and he teaches fiction at Columbia University.
Tiphanie Yanique, Oct. 6 – Yanique is the author of the short story collection “How to Escape from a Leper Colony,” the novel “Land of Love and Drowning” and the poetry collection “Wife.” Her writing has won the BOCAS Prize for Caribbean Fiction and Caribbean Poetry, a Boston Review Prize in Fiction, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Fulbright Scholarship, an Academy of American Poet’s Prize and the Rosenthal Family Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. “Wife” is a finalist for the Forward Prize for a first collection. Yanique is from the Virgin Islands and lives in New Rochelle, N.Y.
John E. Woods, Nov. 3 – Woods won both the 1981 American Book Award and PEN award for his translation of Arno Schmidt’s “Evening Edged in Gold” and has published a new translation of Thomas Mann’s “Buddenbrooks.” He also is the translator of Schmidt’s “Collected Novellas,” “Two Novels: The Stony Heart and B/Moondocks,” “Collected Stories” and “Nobodaddy’s Children,” all of which are available from Dalkey Archive Press based at UHV. He lives in Berlin.
Monica Drake, Dec. 1 – Monica Drake has a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Arizona and teaches at the Pacific Northwest College of Art. Her debut novel, “Clown Girl,” was published by independent press Hawthorne Books and has won an Eric Hoffer Award as well as an Independent Publisher Book Award. It’s been translated into Italian and recently was optioned for a film by Kristen Wiig. Drake’s most recent novel, “The Stud Book,” is now out.
ABR is a nonprofit, internationally distributed literary journal published six times a year. It began in 1977, moved to UHV in 2007 and has a circulation of about 8,000. The journal specializes in reviews of works published by small presses. The series was presented with the Regents’ Academic Excellence Award by the UH System Board of Regents in May.
For more information about the UHV/ABR Reading Series, call the ABR office at 361-570-4101 or go to www.americanbookreview.org.
The University of Houston-Victoria, located in the heart of the Coastal Bend region since 1973 in Victoria, Texas, offers courses leading to more than 80 academic programs in the schools of Arts & Sciences; Business Administration; and Education, Health Professions & Human Development. UHV provides face-to-face classes at its Victoria campus, as well as an instructional site in Katy, Texas, and online classes that students can take from anywhere. UHV supports the American Association of State Colleges and Universities Opportunities for All initiative to increase awareness about state colleges and universities and the important role they have in providing a high-quality and accessible education to an increasingly diverse student population, as well as contributing to regional and state economic development.
