On Nov. 19, poet and Pulitzer Prize finalist Dean Young and award-winning Bosnian-American fiction writer Aleksander Hemon, will read from their works as part of the Althea Ward Clark W’21 Reading Series of the Program in Creative Writing at the Lewis Center for the Arts. The reading will begin at 4:30 p.m. at the Berlind Theatre of the McCarter Theatre Center. The program is free and open to the public.
Young’s collections of poetry include Strike Anywhere (1995), winner of the Colorado Prize for Poetry; Skid (2002), finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; Elegy on Toy Piano (2005), finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and Primitive Mentor (2008), shortlisted for the International Griffin Poetry Prize. His poems have been featured in Best American Poetry numerous times. He has also written a book on poetics, The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction (2010).
Young has also been awarded a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He has taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the low-residency M.F.A. program at Warren Wilson College and the University of Texas-Austin, where he holds the William Livingston Chair of Poetry.
Aleksandar Hemon is the author of The Lazarus Project, which was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award, and three collections of short stories: The Question of Bruno (2001); Nowhere Man (2004), which was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Love and Obstacles (2009). Born in Sarajevo, Hemon visited Chicago in 1992, intending to stay for a matter of months. While he was there, Sarajevo came under siege, and he was unable to return home. Hemon wrote his first story in English in 1995. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003 and a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation in 2004.
The Althea Ward Clark W’21 Reading Series provides an opportunity for students, as well as all in the greater Princeton region to hear and meet the best writers of contemporary poetry and fiction. All readings are free and open to the public and take place on select Wednesdays at 4:30 p.m. at the Berlind Theatre at McCarter Theatre Center. To learn more about this event, the Program in Creative Writing, the Reading Series and the more than 100 events offered annually by the Lewis Center, visit arts.princeton.edu.