The 15th Annual Villanova Literary Festival will feature the following writers.
All readings are free and are followed by a reception and book signing.
Salvatore Scibona, fiction writer
Thursday, Jan. 31, Radnor-St. David's Room, Connelly Center (7 pm)
Salvatore Scibona’s first book, The End, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and winner of the Young Lions Fiction Award from the New York Public Library. In 2010, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and was included in the New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” list of writers to watch. Scibona’s short fiction has won a Pushcart Prize and an O. Henry Award. His work has appeared in The Pushcart Book of Short Stories: The Best Stories from a Quarter-Century of the Pushcart Prize, Best New American Voices, the New York Times, the New Yorker, and more. A graduate of St. John’s College in Santa Fe and of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Scibona administers the writing fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
Diane Gilliam Fisher, poet
Tuesday, Feb. 19, Speaker’s Corner, Falvey Library (7 pm)
Fisher was born and raised in Columbus, Ohio. She received an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Ohio Arts Council in 2003, and Kettle Bottom received the 2004 Intro Award from Perugia Press. Fisher holds a Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literature from The Ohio State University and an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers. She lives in Ohio.
Claire Vaye Watkins, fiction writer
Thursday, Feb. 28, DeLeon Room, St. Augustine Center 300 (7 pm)
Claire Vaye Watkins was born in Bishop, California in 1984. She has received fellowships from the Writers’ Conferences at Sewanee and Bread Loaf. Her stories and essays have appeared in Granta, One Story, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, Best of the West 2011, Best of the Southwest 2013, and elsewhere. A graduate of the University of Nevada Reno, Watkins earned her MFA from the Ohio State University, where she was a Presidential Fellow. She is an assistant professor at Bucknell University and the co-director, with Derek Palacio, of the Mojave School, a non-profit creative writing workshop for teenagers in rural Nevada. Her collection of short stories, Battleborn, was released by Riverhead Books in August 2012.
Mary O’Malley, poet
Thursday, March 21, President's Lounge, Connelly Center (7 pm)
Mary O’Malley, the visiting Heimbold Chair of Irish Studies, was born in Connemara, Ireland and educated at University College, Galway. She began her poetry career in 1990 with the title A Consideration of Silk, from Galway-based publisher Salmon. She has since published six other books including a New and Selected. Her latest books have all been published by British house Carcanet. Her poems have been translated into several languages.
Junot Díaz, fiction writer
Tuesday, April 16, Connelly Center Cinema (7 pm)
Junot Díaz was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey. He is the author of the critically acclaimed Drown; The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and This Is How You Lose Her, a New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist. He is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, PEN/Malamud Award, Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, and PEN/O. Henry Award. A graduate of Rutgers College, Díaz is currently the fiction editor at Boston Review and the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the cofounder of Voices of Our Nation Workshop.
