The 14th Annual Villanova Literary Festival will feature the following writers.
C. D. Wright, poet
Thursday, Feb. 2, Connelly Center Cinema (7 pm)
C. D. Wright was born in Mountain Home, Arkansas. She has published numerous volumes of poetry, including One with Others, which received the 2011 Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Rising, Falling, Hovering, which won the Griffin Poetry Prize; and One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana (2003), a project she undertook with photographer Deborah Luster to document Louisiana inmates. Wright has also published several book-length poems, including the critically acclaimed Deepstep Come Shining (1998). Among her numerous honors are fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Bunting Institute.
Juan Felipe Herrera, poet
Tuesday, Feb. 21, Falvey Library first-floor Lounge (7 pm)
Juan Felipe Herrera is the son of migrant farm workers and was raised in the San Joaquin Valley of California. He attended UCLA, Stanford, and the University of Iowa, and has been an activist, teatrista, photographer, and poet; he led the first formal Chicano trek to Mexican Indian endangered cultures. He has published several volumes of poetry, prose, children’s books, and young adult novels. Among his honors are two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His book Half of the World in Light won the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry and the 2009 PEN/Beyond Margins Award. His collection 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border was awarded the 2008 PEN West award. He is currently the Tomás Rivera Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at the University of California–Riverside.
Hugo Hamilton, fiction writer and memoirist
Tuesday, March 13, President's Lounge, Connelly Center (7 pm)
Hugo Hamilton is the best-selling author of The Speckled People: A Memoir of a Half-Irish Childhood, a German-Irish memoir of growing up in Dublin during the 1950s and 60s with a fervent Irish nationalist father and German mother who came to Ireland after the Second World War. It won the prestigious Prix Femina Étranger in France and the Premio Giuseppe Berto prize in Italy, and appeared on the New York Times list of notable books. Hamilton has also written seven novels and one collection of short stories, all of which reflect on the increasingly compelling issues of cultural divisions, belonging and identity; in 1992 he was awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. His latest novel, Hand in the Fire, was published in 2010. Hamilton lives in Dublin and is the 2012 Charles A. Heimbold, Jr., Chair of Irish Studies at Villanova University.
Téa Obreht, fiction writer
Thursday, April 12, Connelly Center Cinema (7 pm)
Téa Obreht was born in 1985 in the former Yugoslavia and spent her childhood in Cyprus and Egypt before immigrating to the United States in 1997. Her writing has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Zoetrope: All-Story, The New York Times, and The Guardian, and has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Non-Required Reading. She has been named by The New Yorker as one of the twenty best American fiction writers under forty and was included in the National Book Foundation’s list of 5 Under 35. Her debut novel, The Tiger’s Wife (2011), won the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction—she was the youngest novelist to win the prize to date. She lives in Ithaca, New York.
William Kennedy, fiction writer
Thursday, April 26, Connelly Center Cinema (7 pm)
William Kennedy, author, screenwriter, and playwright, was born and raised in Albany, New York. His Albany cycle of novels includes Legs, Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, and the 1984 Pulitzer Prize-winning Ironweed, which also won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was included in the Modern Library list of the 100 best novels written in English in the twentieth century. Kennedy wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation of Ironweed and the play Grand View, and co-wrote the screenplay for The Cotton Club with Francis Ford Coppola. Kennedy’s 2002 novel Roscoe was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2003 PEN/Faulkner Award. He has received numerous literary awards, including the Literary Lions Award from the New York Public Library, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Governor’s Arts Award, and the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award. He is a professor in the English department at the State University of New York at Albany and the founding director of the New York State Writers Institute.
