The Writers Visit

Butler offers a 300-level English course that features the work of authors in the Visiting Writers Series. Students taking this class are invited to join English faculty in a private dinner with each writer when they visit campus, and have the opportunity to formally introduce the writers at their public readings.

The Writers Visit

Faculty, staff, students, and community members are invited to attend the events. Community members attending in person should park in a visitor parking space on campus. Registration is not required.

The Creative Writing Program's Visiting Writers Series brings a number of distinguished authors to campus each semester. Visitors often conduct a colloquium with creative writing students in addition to giving a public reading.Each year, through the Elliston Poet-in-Residence Program, a distinguished poet comes to campus to give public lectures and readings, and to conduct poetry seminars and workshops. The biennial Emerging Fiction Writers Festival brings four writers to campus for two days of readings and panels.Past visiting writers have included Nicholson Baker, Charles Baxter, Sandra Cisneros, Victoria Chang, Mark Doty, Rita Dove, Alice Fulton, Lauren Groff, Terrance Hayes, Juan Felipe Herrera, Cathy Park Hong, Denis Johnson, Lorrie Moore, Robert Pinsky, Tracy K. Smith, and Colson Whitehead.

At the PSFC, Deputy Director Martin Greenwald welcomed the writers with a review of the fusion process and an overview of MIT fusion research, including new advances in superconducting magnet technology that could help reduce the size, cost, and complexity of a fusion power plant. Postdocs Ted Golfinopoulos and Bob Mumgaard guided the group into the C-Mod control room and the experimental cell where the tokamak is housed. Along the way, they showed the difference between typical superconductors and the newly developed thin superconducting tapes, demonstrated how plasma in a glow discharge tube responds to magnets, and fielded questions.

Jost walked on stage promptly to an initially lukewarm audience. However, his jokes on voter turn outs in developing countries and driving around Cleveland brought many to life. A line on how comedy writers must have voted for Mitt Romney had laughter reverberating through the hall.

The Visiting Writers Series began in the Spring of 2014 with a reading by poet Roger Reeves. After the start of the MFA in Creative Writing in the Fall of that year, the VWS took off. Over the past 8 years, the MFA in Creative Writing has hosted nationally renowned poets and writers, adding to the vibrant literary culture of Lexington. All events are free and open to the public.

The Writing Center offers 45-minute appointments with graduate student tutors who work with individual students or with groups. Most tutoring sessions are by appointment; walk-in appointments are provided when tutors are not in a scheduled session. For distance students, we use WCOnline for online appointments. Students have the option of making standing appointments with tutors once per week for up to four weeks at a time. In addition to tutoring services for undergraduate and graduate students, we will visit classrooms to provide writing lessons and group tutorials.

Westbank Library is delighted that Karen MacInerney, author of the Gray Whale Inn mystery series and the Dewberry Farm mystery series among others, will be visiting the library to discuss her latest Gray Whale Inn mystery, "Claws for Alarm," with the Mysteries and More Book Club. May 15, 1 p.m., upstairs in the Gathering Room at Westbank Library.

The Utah Valley University Writing Center is committed to helping all students achieve their academic goals and providing writers of all races, genders, sexualities, cultures, ages, religions, socioeconomic statuses, and abilities with the tools and resources needed to tell their stories and amplify their voices.

Are you an instructor who would like to collaborate with the Writing Center? We are eager to work with you! Please visit our For Instructors page to learn about the many ways we can support you and your students. You can also go straight to our language for your syllabus.

We hope that you will join the hundreds of supporters who help bring world-class writers to our community by becoming a patron of the series. Patrons at the $500+ level are invited to all VIP receptions throughout the year as well as being invited to special series events.

Ruben Gallo, an assistant professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures, is bringing six internationally known Mexican writers to Princeton during the semester to discuss their work and their perspectives on Mexico City's literary scene. The 15 students in Gallo's course, "Contemporary Writers in Mexico City," relish the opportunity to personally engage the subjects of their coursework.

"I really enjoy hearing the writers discuss the writing process. I am not necessarily interested in becoming a writer myself, but it is fascinating to hear about the process that goes into creating a work of fiction and how this attitude and work ethic differs from one author to another," said sophomore Sara Arnold. "It has been interesting to hear the authors themselves discuss the symbols in their writing and share their own interpretations, which have in some cases been similar to my own and in some cases differed."

"I love literary life and literary culture," said Gallo, whose research often takes him to Mexico City to meet with writers and attend readings. "I've noticed that in some literature courses, literature becomes this very abstract, very remote object of study. I wanted to give this experience to the students so they could see that literature is created by people just like us -- you can talk to them, you can have agreements and disagreements about what it all means."

The group of visiting writers included Jorge Volpi and Ignacio Padilla, founders of a literary movement dubbed the "Crack" group, which aims to promote a more modern, cosmopolitan form of Mexican fiction in which writers explore much more than the traditions and customs of their home country.

Volpi, Padilla and Juan Villoro, a noted novelist, essayist and children's author, met with the Princeton students during the first half of the spring semester. Other prominent writers scheduled to participate in the course are journalists Carlos Monsiváis and Alma Guillermoprieto and poet Homero Aridjis.

Students are assigned to read one or more works by each of the writers prior to their visit. In addition to writing two papers over the course of the semester, every student is required to conduct an interview with one of the writers, which they must edit into a newspaper-style article. All of the course sessions, including the visits, are conducted entirely in Spanish.

Volpi, the first visitor to the class, said he was particularly excited to meet with students at Princeton because the early parts of his recent novel, a World War II-era espionage thriller titled "En Busca de Klingsor" ("In Search of Klingsor"), are set at the neighboring Institute for Advanced Study. Following his visit to Princeton, Volpi said he was impressed with the students' knowledge of Mexican literature and enjoyed speaking with them not only about the structure of his novel, but the worlds of science and politics as well.

"What's fascinating about Volpi is that he has actively tried to break from Mexican literary tradition," said sophomore Brady Walkinshaw. "He has tried to write about broader cosmopolitan themes and not focus on anything that's traditionally viewed as Mexican -- moving away from imposed expectations of writers in Latin America that they should write about localist themes."

Villoro, who unlike Volpi focuses on Mexican characters and culture in his work, emphasized during his talk with the class that writers do not need to employ elements of the more traditional, mystical "magic realism" genre for their works to be considered genuine Mexican literature. For example, Villoro, 47, spoke with the students about the influence American popular culture, particularly rock music and television, has had on Mexicans of his generation and on his work.

"There is a certain label which tends to regard all Latin American literature as a necessary branch of magic real-ism. Not everything has to do with ancient myths and traditions," Villoro said an interview after his visit. "The students were particularly interested in the new visions of Mexican and Latin American literature, which are not as strongly linked with magical and mythical traditions."

Junior Emily Woodman-Maynard said that, although the works of Volpi and Villoro are very different, their visits to class showed that "in some ways they share a lot in common. They are critical of a lot of the same things, like telling Mexican or Latin American writers that they can only write about Latin American subjects."

Students said that Gallo ties the writers' visits together effectively through readings and class discussions, giving the students perspective on each writer's work and their roles in the vibrant debates over the direction of Mexican literature. "Professor Gallo is able to talk to us about what it's like for an author to publish, what the intellectual community is like in Mexico City, what happens to people who are writing in the same circles, how ideas travel between people and also between countries," Woodman-Maynard said.

"It has been a fantastic experience. I just finished reading some of the in-terviews my students conducted with the writers, and I was amazed at the level of engagement that I've seen. The students not only asked some very smart questions, but they also managed to connect with the writers on a more personal level," Gallo said.

"Literature is about life, and they managed to relate the writers' work to their own lives very ingeniously," he added. "The writers have all been impressed by the level of seriousness and dedication they have seen in the students." 041b061a72