Terrance Hayes and Jaimy Gordon, who each won the National Book Award last spring, will read from their work Sept. 22 at Vanderbilt University as part of the Creative Writing Program’s Gertrude and Harold S. Vanderbilt Visiting Writers Series.
All readings in the series are free and open to the public. This semester’s lineup includes poet Christopher Buckley (Oct. 13), fiction writers Rattawut Lapcharoenap (Oct. 20), Sarah Shun-lien Bynum (Nov. 3) and Anthony Doerr (Nov. 17) and poet and nonfiction writer Nick Flynn (Nov. 10), author of the memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. A film of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City starring Al Pacino and Julianne Moore is scheduled to be released in 2012. All the readings are free and open to the public.
Hayes and Gordon will read 7 p.m. Sept. 22 in the Sarratt Cinema in the Sarratt Student Center.
Hayes won the 2010 National Book Award for his book of poetry, Lighthead. He is also the author of Wind in a Box and Hip Logic, which won the 2001 National Poetry Series and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award and runner-up for the American Academy of Poets’ James Laughlin Award. His first book, Muscular Music, won him the prestigious Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a Whiting Writers Award.
“First you’ll marvel at his skill, his near-perfect pitch, his disarming humor, his brilliant turns of phrase,” poet Cornelius Eady has written about Hayes. “Then you’ll notice the grace, the tenderness, the unblinking truth-telling just beneath his lines, the open and generous way he takes in our world.”
Gordon won the 2010 National Book Award for her novel Lord of Misrule. Her previous novels were Shamp of the City-Solo, She Drove Without Stopping and Bogeywoman, which was on the Los Angeles Times’ list of Best Fiction of 2000.
Gordon has been a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and at the Bunting Institute, now the Radcliffe Institute of Harvard University. She also publishes poems, essays and translations, and her short fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories. She teaches at Western Michigan University and in the Prague Summer Program for Writers.