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Jim Shepard

Wednesday | Oct. 22, 2008 | 7:30 p.m. | Ely Room, Wyndham

Jim Shepard is the author of nine books, including the short story collection Like You’d Understand, Anyway, a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award and the winner of the fourth annual Story Prize. In the New York Times Book Review, Daniel Handler described that book as a testament “to the power of the short story itself…serving no agenda but literature’s primary and oft-forgotten one: the delight of the reader.”

Ishmael Beah

Monday | Oct. 27, 2008 | 7:30 p.m. | Great Hall

Ishmael Beah is the author of the best-selling memoir A Long Way Gone, the story of his experience as a child soldier in Sierra Leone. Sebastian Junger writes, “A Long Way Gone is one of the most important war stories of our generation. The arming of children is among the greatest evils of the modern world, and yet we know so little about it because the children themselves are swallowed up by the very wars they are forced to wage. Ishmael Beah…has become one of its most eloquent chroniclers.”

Amy Hempel

Thursday | Nov. 13, 2008 | 7:30 p.m. | Ely Room, Wyndham

Amy Hempel is the author of five books of short stories, including The Dog of the Marriage, Tumble Home, and Reasons to Live. Her most recent book, The Collected Stories, was one of the New York Times’ Ten Best Books of 2007. Critic Erica Wagner wrote, “Here is the redemption of real art. You could call Hempel part of a movement in the trajectory of the American short story, and Rick Moody, in his intelligent introduction, places her alongside Alice Munro, Grace Paley, Ann Beattie, and others.”

Gerald Stern

Wednesday | Feb. 11, 2008 | 7:30 p.m. | Ely Room, Wyndham

Gerald Stern is the author of 16 books of poems, including Everything is Burning, American Sonnets, and Last Blue, and a book of essays, What I Can’t Bear Losing: Notes From a Life. The Southern Review declared, “We might like to think of Gerald Stern as our quintessentially Whitmanian American poet, but he is far too literate, too worldly, to seem typically American.” Poet Edward Hirsch remarked, “Gerald Stern is a romantic with a sense of humor, an Orphic voice living inside history, a sometimes comic, sometimes tragic visionary.”

Reading sponsored by an anonymous gift and the Marianne Moore Fund for the Study of Poetry.

Mary Jo Salter

Wednesday | March 4, 2008 | 7:30 p.m. | Ely Room, Wyndham

Poet Richard Wilbur described Mary Jo Salter’s first book as “full of alertness, tact, credible feeling, and an unforced gaiety of form.” Nobel Laureate Joseph Brodsky wrote that “Salter’s work embodies the marriage of superb craftsmanship to the tragic sense of reality.” Salter is the author of six books of poetry, including A Phone Call to the Future: New and Selected Poems and Open Shutters.

Reading sponsored by an anonymous gift and the Marianne Moore Fund for the Study of Poetry.

Marilyn Hacker

Wednesday | April 8, 2008 | 7:15 p.m | Ely Room, Wyndham

Marilyn Hacker is the author of 13 books of poetry, including Essays on Departure: New and Selected Poems; Desesperanto: Poems 1999-2002; Squares and Courtyards; and First Cities: Collected Early Poems, 1960-1979. Maxine Kumin says of Hacker’s Winter Numbers, “This stunning book critiques our life and times—AIDS, the Holocaust, breast cancer, civil wars—with an unparalleled lyric candor. The tone is elegiac; the thrust is life-affirming.”

Reading sponsored by an anonymous gift and the Marianne Moore Fund for the Study of Poetry.

Tobias Wolff

Wednesday | April 15, 2008 | 7:30 p.m. | Great Hall

Tobias Wolff’s books include the memoirs This Boy’s Life and In Pharaoh’s Army; the short novel The Barracks Thief; three collections of stories, In The Garden of the North American Martyrs, Back in the World, and The Night in Question; and the novel Old School. His most recent work, Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories, was called “a towering monument of a book” in the Washington Post. His work has received the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the PEN/Malamud Award.

Cornelius Eady

Wednesday | April 29, 2008 | 7:30 p.m. | Ely Room, Wyndham

Poet June Jordan remarked of Cornelius Eady that he “leads and then cuts a line like no one else: following the laughter and the compassionate path of a dauntless imagination, these poems beeline or zigzag always to the jugular.” Eady is the author of eight volumes of poetry, including Hardheaded Weather: New and Selected Poems and Brutal Imagination, which was a National Book Award finalist.

Reading sponsored by an anonymous gift and the Marianne Moore Fund for the Study of Poetry.