Arts

Butler University’s spring 2017 Vivian S. Delbrook Visiting Writers Series begins with Marlon James on January 23 and continues with Lucie Brock-Broido (January 31), Mandel (February 20), Gabrielle Calvocoressi (March 16), Charlie Jane Anders (April 6), and Diane Seuss (April 18).

All events in the series are free and open to the public without tickets. All talks begin at 7:30 PM. Locations for each event are listed below.

Marlon James
Monday, January 23
Schrott Center for the Arts
Marlon James was born in Jamaica in 1970. His most recent novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings, won the 2015 Man Booker Prize. It was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature for fiction, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction, and the Minnesota Book Award. It was also a New York Times Notable Book.

James is also the author of The Book of Night Women, which won the 2010 Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Minnesota Book Award, and was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction and an NAACP Image Award. His first novel, John Crow’s Devil, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for first fiction and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and was a New York Times Editors’ Choice.

Lucie Brock-Broido
Tuesday, January 31
Atherton Union Reilly Room
Lucie Brock-Broido was born in Pittsburgh, was educated at Johns Hopkins and Columbia University, and has taught at Bennington, Princeton, Harvard (where she was a Briggs-Copeland poet), and Columbia. She is the recipient of fellowships from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation, as well as awards from the American Poetry Review and the Academy of American Arts and Letters.

In an interview with Carol Maso for BOMB magazine in 1995, she said her “theory is that a poem is troubled into its making. It’s not a thing that blooms; it’s a thing that wounds.” This theory bears itself out in her collections, A Hunger (1988), The Master Letters (1995), Trouble in Mind (2004), and Stay, Illusion (2013), which often explore obsessions and anxieties (of influence, ritual, mortality, and modernity), and which use whatever is available to create vivid, sometimes disorienting, portraits of mind. Stay, Illusion was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Emily St. John Mandel
Monday, February 20
Atherton Union Reilly Room
Emily St. John Mandel is the author of four novels, most recently Station Eleven, which was a finalist for a National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and won the 2015 Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Toronto Book Award, and the Morning News Tournament of Books, and has been translated into 27 languages.

A previous novel, The Singer’s Gun, was the 2014 winner of the Prix Mystere de la Critique in France. Her short fiction and essays have been anthologized in numerous collections, including Best American Mystery Stories 2013. She is a staff writer for The Millions.

Gabrielle Calvocoressi
Thursday, March 16
Atherton Union Reilly Room
Gabrielle Calvocoressi is a poet and essayist whose most recent book, Apocalyptic Swing, was a finalist for The Los Angeles Times Book Award.  Her poems have been featured in The New York Times, Boston Review, The Washington Post, on Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac and in numerous journals and are forthcoming in Poetry Magazine and At Length. She writes the Sports Desk column for The Best American Poetry blog and is on the advisory board of The Rumpus‘ Poetry Book Club.

She has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including The Paris Review‘s Bernard F. Conners Prize, a Rona Jaffe Woman Writers Award, a Stegner Fellowship and Jones Lectureship from Stanford University, a Civitella di Ranieri fellowship and Lannan Foundation Residency Fellowship in Marfa, Texas. She sits on the poetry boards of The Rumpus and From the Fishouse. She is the Senior Poetry Editor for The Los Angeles Review of Books.

Charlie Jane Anders
Thursday, April 6
Atherton Union Reilly Room
Charlie Jane Anders is the author of All the Birds in the Sky and Choir Boys, which won the Lambda Literary Award. She’s the organizer of the Writers With Drinks reading series, and she was a founding editor of io9, a website about science fiction, science and futurism. Her stories have appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Tor.com, Lightspeed, Tin House, ZYZZYVA, and several anthologies. Her novelette “Six Months, Three Days” won a Hugo award.

She writes: “I was a founding editor of io9.com, where I’m probably best known for my reviews of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and The Last Airbender. Or my super detailed look at the making of Mork and Mindy. Or for my Game of Thrones recaps.  Or for my writing advice columns. Or my in-depth investigation of people who claim HIV doesn’t cause AIDS. Or my geeky articles about topics like the search for a cure for cancer, or how Leonard Nimoy changed everything, or how the TV show Star Blazers helped me deal with being bullied. Or just generally being an obnoxious loud-mouth.”

Diane Seuss
Tuesday, April 18
Robertson Hall Ford Salon
Diane Seuss was born in Michigan City, Indiana, in 1956 and raised in Edwardsburg and Niles, Michigan. She studied at Kalamazoo College and Western Michigan University, where she received a master’s degree in social work. Seuss is the author of three books of poetry: Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open (University of Massachusetts Press, 2010), recipient of the Juniper Prize for Poetry;  It Blows You Hollow (New Issues Press, 1998), and her third book Four-Legged Girl (Graywolf Press, 2015) was a finalist for a Pulitzer in 2016.

She served as the MacLean Distinguished Visiting Professor in the English department at Colorado College in 2012 and is currently writer-in-residence at Kalamazoo College, where she has been on the faculty since 1988.