Story Week Goes to AWP
Story Week Goes to AWP
On Friday, February 13, 8:30 pm, the Fiction Writing Department presents a special event during the annual Associated Writers and Writing Programs Conference that will be held in Chicago this year. Entitled Story Week Goes to AWP: Literary Rock & Roll, it features readings by Dorothy Allison, Joe Meno, ZZ Packer, and music by Mucca Pazza, a 30-piece circus punk marching band.
Hilton Chicago, International Ballroom
720 S. Michigan, Chicago.
Free and open to the public.
Dorothy Allison was born in Greenville, South Carolina, and makes her home in northern California with her partner of twenty years, Alix Layman, whom she married on All Souls' Day 2008. Their son, Wolf, was witness and ring bearer. Allison's books include Bastard Out of Carolina; Skin: Talking About Sex, Class and Literature; Two or Three Things I Know for Sure; Cavedweller; Trash; as well as the poetry chapbook The Women Who Hate Me. A novel, She Who, is forthcoming from Penguin. She will be the McGee Professor at Davidson College for fall 2009.
Joe Meno is a fiction writer and playwright who lives in Chicago. A winner of the Nelson Algren Literary Award and the Society of Midland Authors Fiction Prize, he is the author of four novels, The Boy Detective Fails (Akashic 2006), Hairstyles of the Damned (Akashic 2004), Tender As Hellfire (St. Martin's 1999), and How the Hula Girl Sings (HarperCollins 2001). His short-story collections are Bluebirds Used to Croon in the Choir (TriQuarterly 2005) and Demons in the Spring (Akashic 2008.) His short fiction has been published in the likes of McSweeney's, Witness, TriQuarterly, Mid-American Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Washington Square, Other Voices, Gulf Coast, and broadcast on NPR. His latest novel, The Great Perhaps, will be published in May 2009 by W.W. Norton.
ZZ Packer graduated from Yale University, received master's degrees from Johns Hopkins and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford University. Her collection of short stories, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere (Canongate/Riverhead Books), was a New York Times Notable Book, winner of a Commonwealth Club Fiction Award and an Alex Award, and a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist. In 2007, she was named one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists. Her fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper's and Zoetrope, while her nonfiction has been featured in the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, and Salon. She has received a Whiting Writers' Award, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and two sons. "Buffalo Soldiers," her story that was published in Granta, is from her novel in progress, The Thousands.
Mucca Pazza is an astounding, thirty-person, "circus punk," marching band that plays everything from Gainsbourg to Le Tigre, Bar-Kays to Ali Hassan Kuban, as well as many original compositions. One would think that only in Dr. Seuss's imagination could a marching band perform in ten canoes going down the Chicago River, but Mucca Pazza did! They've also played in punk venues, orchestral halls, public parks, private extravaganzas, diva palaces, dive bars, at Lollapalooza, and on Late Night with Conan O'Brien. For more about the band and their newly released CD, visit www.mucca-pazza.org or www.myspace.com/muccapazza.
Hilton Chicago, International Ballroom
720 S. Michigan, Chicago.
Free and open to the public.
Dorothy Allison was born in Greenville, South Carolina, and makes her home in northern California with her partner of twenty years, Alix Layman, whom she married on All Souls' Day 2008. Their son, Wolf, was witness and ring bearer. Allison's books include Bastard Out of Carolina; Skin: Talking About Sex, Class and Literature; Two or Three Things I Know for Sure; Cavedweller; Trash; as well as the poetry chapbook The Women Who Hate Me. A novel, She Who, is forthcoming from Penguin. She will be the McGee Professor at Davidson College for fall 2009.
Joe Meno is a fiction writer and playwright who lives in Chicago. A winner of the Nelson Algren Literary Award and the Society of Midland Authors Fiction Prize, he is the author of four novels, The Boy Detective Fails (Akashic 2006), Hairstyles of the Damned (Akashic 2004), Tender As Hellfire (St. Martin's 1999), and How the Hula Girl Sings (HarperCollins 2001). His short-story collections are Bluebirds Used to Croon in the Choir (TriQuarterly 2005) and Demons in the Spring (Akashic 2008.) His short fiction has been published in the likes of McSweeney's, Witness, TriQuarterly, Mid-American Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Washington Square, Other Voices, Gulf Coast, and broadcast on NPR. His latest novel, The Great Perhaps, will be published in May 2009 by W.W. Norton.
ZZ Packer graduated from Yale University, received master's degrees from Johns Hopkins and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford University. Her collection of short stories, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere (Canongate/Riverhead Books), was a New York Times Notable Book, winner of a Commonwealth Club Fiction Award and an Alex Award, and a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist. In 2007, she was named one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists. Her fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper's and Zoetrope, while her nonfiction has been featured in the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, and Salon. She has received a Whiting Writers' Award, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and two sons. "Buffalo Soldiers," her story that was published in Granta, is from her novel in progress, The Thousands.
Mucca Pazza is an astounding, thirty-person, "circus punk," marching band that plays everything from Gainsbourg to Le Tigre, Bar-Kays to Ali Hassan Kuban, as well as many original compositions. One would think that only in Dr. Seuss's imagination could a marching band perform in ten canoes going down the Chicago River, but Mucca Pazza did! They've also played in punk venues, orchestral halls, public parks, private extravaganzas, diva palaces, dive bars, at Lollapalooza, and on Late Night with Conan O'Brien. For more about the band and their newly released CD, visit www.mucca-pazza.org or www.myspace.com/muccapazza.