For those students who enjoy adding books to their Facebook Virtual bookshelf, Thursday evening will provide a chance of a lifetime. The SHSU Department of English will welcome fiction writers Antonya Nelson and Robert Boswell for a reading from their works. Please join the English Department in welcoming them and other fiction reading enthusiasts tonight, March 27th, at 6:30 p.m. in Evans Complex 105. This wonderful opportunity to hear work from two contemporary and highly successful authors is free to the public. “As part of our ever-present efforts to build the literary community at Sam Houston and in Huntsville, we’re thrilled to have the opportunity to listen to Nelson and Boswell read from and discuss their work,” said Dr. Scott Kaukonen, assistant professor of English. “Not only do they enjoy stellar reputations as practicioners of the art of creative writing, but they’re also highly praised as teachers of the craft.”
Nelson has written eight books of fiction, both novels and short story collections. Her works include Some Fun, Female Trouble, Talking in Bed, Nobody’s Girl and Living to Tell. Named by the New Yorker as one of the “twenty young fiction writer’s for the new millennium”, she has enjoyed success in receiving the Rea Award for Short Fiction and is a recipient of an NEA Grant 2000-2001 and a Guggenheim Fellowship. The Atlantic Monthly described her writing; “A master of the casually scathing observationyet for every moment of sardonic humor in her works, Nelson shows one of vulnerability, and her writing is ultimately defined not by its cleverness but by its heart.”
Robert Boswell’s recent novel Century’s Son is just his latest novel to appear on national bookshelves. He is the author of six other books of fiction: America Owned Love, Living to Be 100, Mystery Ride, The Geography of Desire, Dancing in the Movies and Crooked Hearts. He has received two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Iowa School of Letters Award for Fiction, the PEN West Award for Fiction and the Evil Companions Award.
Three movies have been made from Boswell’s fiction, including Glissando, based on his short story; Twelve Mile Road. His novel Mystery Ride was a made-for-television production. Hollywood actors Jennifer Jason Leigh, Juliette Lewis, Noah Wylie, Peter Coyote and Peter Berg starred in the movie based on his novel, Crooked Hearts, concerning a young college graduate who returns home after graduation. Reunited with his dysfunctional family, he learns about his father’s secret affair and his family relationships unravel. Dealing with the secrets of their father’s past is complicated as new tragedies ultimately force the family back together. Author Charles Baxter has said, “There is no novelist in America who writes about emotional secrets and the hoarding of private passions with more feeling and insight than Robert Boswell. He writes with a particularly acute generosity of spirit about all his characters, high and low, human and animal; if the word ‘humane’ means anything, in an age of terror, we will have to learn, or re-learn, its definition from books like this.”
Nelson and Boswell are married and share the Cullen Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Houston. They also teach in the Warren Wilson MFA Program as well as at New Mexico State. Don’t miss this exceptional opportunity to hear two of today’s best authors personally read their own work, answer questions from the audience, and to purchase signed copies of their work. At the end of the evening you can recommend to your friends their novels on your Facebook Virtual Bookshelf while adding exceptional literature to your virtual library and reading list.