Creative Nonfiction Week
Welcome from the Co-Chairs
Welcome to Creative Nonfiction Week 2008, an annual collaboration between the English, Fiction Writing and Journalism departments at Columbia College Chicago. Our goal is to bring you a range of voices, familiar and new, renowned and emerging, all helping to define and redefine the genre of creative nonfiction.
Creative nonfiction comes in many forms: memoir, narrative journalism, travel writing, personal essay, descriptive storytelling, and more. What they all have in common is a basis in reality, from careful observation to honest emotional truth.
This year, we are pleased to bring you a variety of writers, storytellers and journalists who are exploring creative nonfiction in many media through writing, sound, performance and image. We hope you find them as inspiring as we do.
All events are free and open to the public. Creative Nonfiction Week is co-sponsored by the departments of English, Fiction Writing, and Journalism.
Jump to the schedule for:
M 20 October || T 21 October || W 22 October || R 23 October
Abraham Bolden || Mark Harris || Julia Keller || Jonathan Kozol ||
Phillip Lopate
Speaker Bios || Panelist / Reader Bios
For more information:
Please contact Paula Payton
by phone: (312) 369-8101
or email: ppayton [at] colum.edu.
Daily Schedule
Monday/ October 20
2:30 PM Student Question & Answer with Jonathan Kozol
Film Row Cinema, 1104 S. Wabash, 8th floor
7:30 PM Jonathan Kozol
Film Row Cinema, 1104 S. Wabash, 8th floor
Tuesday/ October 21
1 PM Student Reading
Readers TBA
Film Row Cinema, 1104 S. Wabash
3 PM Abraham Bolden
Film Row Cinema, 1104 S. Wabash, 8th floor
7 PM Julia Keller
Film Row Cinema, 1104 S. Wabash, 8th floor
Wednesday, October 22
3 PM Panel Discussion
Panel TBA
Film Row Cinema, 1104 S. Wabash
7 PM Mark Harris
Film Row Cinema, 1104 S. Wabash, 8th floor
Thursday, October 23
3 PM Faculty Reading
Readers TBA
Film Row Cinema, 1104 S. Wabash
5 PM South Loop Review Release Party & Reading
Celebration and Reading for South Loop Review, Vol. 10, the nonfiction journal published by the English Department.
Hokin Annex, 623 S. Wabash, 1st Floor
7 PM Phillip Lopate
Film Row Cinema, 1104 S. Wabash, 8th floor
Abraham Bolden was the first African American to serve on the U.S. Secret Service, working for JFK's administration. As part of Kennedy's detail, he became aware that his fellow Secret Service agents didn't take their job seriously and were lax in their job of protecting the President. He said he often saw them drunk on the job. After the assassination, Bolden decided it was important to reveal what he had learned. The day before he planned to met with a Warren Commission lawyer to discuss these issues, he was arrested on trumped-up counterfeiting charges and sentenced to six years in prison. He eventually served four years on the charges. To this day, he continues to fight to clear his name.
His memoir of these events, The Echo from Dealey Plaza, just came out this past spring from Crown Publishing Group/Random House. It's a moving story of his efforts to fight a racist infrastructure in the Secret Service in the early-1960s (while Kennedy was simultaneously trying to integrate the White House labor force), and of his struggle to maintain his wits and spirit after being falsely convicted and while serving four years in prison.
The book has been described by Kirkus Reviews as "an astonishing tale of aborted justice." Publisher's Weekly writes that the book portrays a "world of duplicitous charges and disappearing documents" that are "fit for a movie thriller."
Bolden graduated cum laude from Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri, with a B.A. in music composition. He served in the U.S. Secret Service from 1960 to 1964. Bolden is retired and now lives in Chicago.
Mark Harris is a former environmental columnist with the Los Angeles Times Syndicate. His articles and essays have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Reader’s Digest, E: The Environmental Magazine, Hope, and Vegetarian Times. His profile of a foster care community for Chicago Parent won a journalism award for feature writing. He is a member of the Society of Environmental Journalists. Mark lives with his family in eastern Pennsylvania.
For Grave Matters, Mark has been interviewed by Fresh Air host Terry Gross and CNN. His views on green burial and funeral matters have also appeared in USA Today, the Washington Post, Baltimore Sun, and People magazine, among others.
Whatever Happened to ‘Dust to Dust’? You Can Still Find It in Green Burial. By the time Nate Fisher was laid to rest in a woodland grave sans coffin in the final season of Six Feet Under, Americans all across the country were starting to look outside the box when death came calling.
Grave Matters follows a dozen such families who found in “green” burial a more natural, more economic and ultimately more meaningful alternative to the tired and toxic send-off on offer at the local funeral parlor.
Eschewing chemical embalming and fancy caskets, burial vaults and costly funerals, they have embraced a range of natural options, new and old, that are redefining a better American way of death. Environmental journalist Mark Harris examines this new green burial underground, leading you into natural cemeteries and domestic graveyards, taking you aboard boats from which ashes and memorial “reef balls” are cast into the sea. He follows a family that conducts a home funeral and delivers a loved one to the crematory, another that hires a carpenter to build a pine coffin.
In the morbidly fascinating tradition of Stiff, Grave Matters details the embalming process and the environmental aftermath of the standard funeral. Harris also traces the history of burial in America, from frontier cemeteries to the billion-dollar business it is today, reporting on real families who opted for more simple, natural return.
Julia Keller, winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing, was born and raised in Huntington, West Virginia. Her book, “Mr. Gatling’s Terrible Marvel: The Gun That Changed Everything and the Misunderstood Genius Who Invented It,” was recently published by Viking. Her novel for young adults, “Back,” will be published in the fall of 2009.
Keller was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and served as McGraw Professor of Writing at Princeton University. She earned a Ph.D. in English Literature at Ohio State University; her dissertation explored literary biographies of Virginia Woolf. She is an essayist for the PBS program “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.”
Jonathan Kozol is an educator and activist whose 1967 Death at an Early Age detailed his experiences as a first-year teacher in Boston Public Schools. Nearly 25 years later, Kozol’s revelations about East St. Louis Public Schools in Savage Inequalities earned him finalist honors for the 1992 National Book Critics Circle Award.
Kozol is one of America’s most tireless and influential advocates for public education. He is the one man who put the nation’s public schools on the national political agenda, and he fights tirelessly for the rights and needs of children.
Kozol's books have set the agenda for social change for three decades. His book Death at an Early Age has sold over two million copies, while Illiterate America made public the debate on adult illiteracy. In 1985, Kozol spent a year working in a homeless shelter, and his book Rachel and her Children gave voice to the people living in desperate poverty and to the tragic death of an 8-month-old child. His other books include Savage Inequalities, Amazing Grace, and Ordinary Resurrections, which deals with one of the South Bronx's most dismal neighborhoods, Mott Haven, whose residents struggle with poverty, imprisoned fathers, asthma and AIDS.
In A New War on Poverty: Jonathan Kozol on Equality and Opportunity in America, Kozol asks the following questions: In a nation of such abundance, why do so many children go without a decent education? What are the true costs of childhood poverty, and why does the American political system seem incapable of addressing them?
Kozol is one of the few people who have worked tirelessly to keep these questions before the public. His talks are a searing expose of the tragedy of childhood poverty and sub-standard education. Audiences will leave the room with a deeper understanding of the challenges America faces, and practical solutions for meeting them.
Phillip Lopate Widely considered one of the foremost American essayists and a central figure in the recent revival of interest in memoir writing, Phillip Lopate is best known for his supple and surprising essays, which have been collected most recently in Getting Personal: Selected Writings (Basic Books, 2003). Lopate is the author of three essay collections, Bachelorhood (Little, Brown & Co., 1981), Against Joie de Vivre (Simon & Schuster, 1989), and Portrait of My Body (Doubleday-Anchor, 1996). He has also published two novels, Confessions of Summer (Doubleday, 1979) and The Rug Merchant (Viking, 1987); two poetry collections, The Eyes Don't Always Want to Stay Open (Sun Press, 1972) and The Daily Round (Sun Press, 1976); and a memoir of his teaching experiences, Being With Children (Doubleday, 1975). He has also edited the anthologies The Art of the Personal Essay, Writing New York (The Library of America, 1998), Journal of a Living Experiment (Teachers & Writers Press, 1979), and a series collecting the best essays of the year, The Anchor Essay Annual (Anchor, 1997-9). Lopate’s work has been included in The Best American Essays and The Pushcart Prize series. His most recent book of nonfiction prose is the urbanistic meditation Waterfront: A Journey Around Manhattan, of which Conde-Nast Traveler wrote, “The celebrated essayist takes a tour of the city’s ever-changing perimeter, sharing his knowledge of New York’s history, mythology, and plans for the future. Poring over his informed, readable prose is like taking a stroll with a favorite professor: he is opinionated, casual, and erudite in equal measure.”
Also a film critic, Lopate has written about movies for The New York Times, Vogue, Esquire, Film Comment, Film Quarterly, Cinemabook, Tikkun, American Film, and the anthology The Movie That Changed My Life, among others. A volume of his selected movie criticism, Totally Tenderly Tragically, was published by Doubleday-Anchor in 1998. His most recent anthology is American Movie Criticism: From the Silent Era to the Present (The Library of America, 2006). His writings about architecture and urbanism have appeared in Metropolis, The New York Times, Double Take, Preservation, Cite and 7 Days, where he wrote a bimonthly architectural column. He was also a recipient of a Revson Fellowship in Urban Studies at Columbia, and served as a committee-member for the Municipal Art Society and as a consultant for Ric Burns' PBS documentary on the history of New York City. He has written on travel for the New York Times Sophisticated Traveler, Conde Nast Traveler, European Travel and Life, Sidestreets of the World, and American Airlines Magazine.
Lopate’s many awards include a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Public Library Center for Scholars and Writers Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts grants, and two New York Foundation for the Arts grants. He also received a Christopher medal for Being With Children, the Texas Institute of Letters award for best non-fiction book of the year (Bachelorhood), and was a finalist for the PEN Diamondston-Spielvogel Award for best essay book of the year (Portrait of My Body). His anthology Writing New York received an honorable mention from the Municipal Art Society's Brendan Gill Award, and a citation from the New York Society Library.
Phillip Lopate was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1943, and received a bachelor's degree at Columbia in 1964, and a doctorate at Union Graduate School in 1979. He currently holds the Adams Chair at Hofstra University, where he is a Professor of English.
<