Cropper Series for 2017-2018 Announced!

The Cropper Center for Creative Writing is pleased to announce its Lindsay J. Cropper Memorial Writers Series for 2017-2018!

Our first guest will be nonfiction writer Maggie Nelson. On Thursday, October 5, 2017, at 12:30 p.m., in Hahn University Center, Forum C, she’ll deliver the Barrie Cropper Memorial Lecture on the Craft of Creative Writing; that evening at 6 p.m., in Mother Rosalie Hill Hall, Warren Auditorium, she’ll read from her own work. Maggie Nelson is the author of nine books, many of which have become cult classics defying categorization. Her nonfiction titles include the National Book Critics Circle Award winner and New York Times bestseller The Argonauts; The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (a New York Times Notable Book of the Year); Bluets (named by Bookforum as one of the top 10 best books of the past 20 years); The Red Parts; and Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions. Her poetry titles include Something Bright, Then Holes and Jane: A Murder (finalist for the PEN/ Martha Albrand Art of the Memoir). In 2016, Nelson was awarded a MacArthur “genius” Fellowship. She has also been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Nonfiction, an NEA in Poetry, an Innovative Literature Fellowship from Creative Capital, and an Arts Writers Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation. She holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and has taught literature, writing, criticism and theory at the New School, Pratt Institute, and Wesleyan University. She has been on the faculty of the School of Critical Studies at CalArts since 2005, and currently lives in Los Angeles.  A book signing and dessert reception will follow the evening event.

Our second fall reader will be fiction writer Brit Bennett, who will read on Thursday, November 16, 2017, at 6 p.m., in Mother Rosalie Hill Hall, Warren Auditorium.  Born and raised in Southern California, Brit Bennett graduated from Stanford University and later earned her MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan, where she won a Hopwood Award in Graduate Short Fiction as well as the 2014 Hurston/Wright Award for College Writers. Her work is featured in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and Jezebel. Her first novel, The Mothers, was longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard First Novel Prize and was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. In 2016, Bennett was named one of the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35.  A book signing and dessert reception will follow the reading.

In the spring, poet Shane McCrae will read on Thursday, March 15, 2018, at 6 p.m., in Mother Rosalie Hill Hall, Warren Auditorium. Shane McCrae has written five full-length books of poems—In the Language of My Captor; Forgiveness Forgiveness; The Animal Too Big to Kill (winner of the 2014 Lexi Rudnitsky/Editor’s Choice Award); Blood; and Mule (a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a PEN Center USA Literary Award)—and three chapbooks. His poems and prose have appeared in many anthologies, including The Best American series, and have been published in The American Poetry Review, Fence, Boston Review, Agni, jubilat, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a JD from Harvard Law School. The recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, he teaches at Oberlin College and lives in Oberlin, Ohio.  A book signing and dessert reception will follow the reading.

Our last event of the year will be on Thursday, April 26, 2018, at 6 p.m., in Mother Rosalie Hill Hall, Room 102, when our Creative Writing Emphasis students will read their own fiction, nonfiction and poetry as a celebration of their work throughout the year.  A dessert reception will follow the readings.

All of our readings are free and open to the public. We look forward to seeing you at all of these events!

Sponsored by the Cropper Center for Creative Writing and the Department of English.