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Monday, * * * * * Free and open to the public. |
Richard Bausch is a contemporary American author―a master of the short story and novel whose writing has been compared with that of Ernest Hemingway. This spring, he is serving as the 2007-08 Mackey Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at Beloit College. Bausch will offer a public reading on Monday, April 14, at 8 p.m., in the Moore Lounge, in Pearsons Hall. Like most events at the college, the reading is free and open to the public.
A prolific writer, Bausch is the author of 11 novels and seven collections of short stories. His latest novel, Peace, will be released on April 15 by the Knopf Publishing Group (Random House). It has been called “ …a small masterpiece with the same emotional force and moral complexity as Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Tolstoy’s Hadji Murad.” His other novels include The Last Good Time (1986), Hello to the Cannibals (2002) and Thanksgiving Night (2006). Bausch’s short stories have appeared in many prize-winning anthologies, including Best American Short Stories, O’Henry and Pushcart. “I have always believed,” Bausch wrote in his preface to The Stories of Richard Bausch (2004), “that writing stories is not so much a matter of obsession as it is of devotion.”
Bausch has won two National Magazine Awards, the PEN/Malamud Award, the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Best Writers’ Award. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and he serves as a perennial editor of the Norton Anthology of American Short Stories.
“Bausch is one of the few major American contemporary fiction writers who are equally effective in long and short forms,” says Chris Fink, assistant professor of English at Beloit College.
An alumnus of the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Bausch has taught writing at the University of Michigan, the University of Virginia, the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont, the University of the South and elsewhere. At Beloit, he will lead the Mackey workshop, a cornerstone of the college’s creative writing program.
“While we have hosted many brilliant Mackey Chairs in fiction in the past two decades, not all of them are also known as brilliant teachers,” continues Fink. “Bausch brings wisdom, wit, enthusiasm, generosity and─perhaps above all─inspiration to his students.”
The Lois and Willard Mackey Chair in Creative Writing brings a distinguished author to Beloit College for all or part of one semester to teach an advanced course in creative writing. It was established in the late 1980s by Beloit College alumnus Willard Mackey, of the class of 1947, in honor of his late wife, a member of the class of 1945. Past visiting authors include Denise Levertov, Peter Matthiessen, Rick Bass, Ursula K. Le Guin, Raymond Carver, Billy Collins, Bei Dao and William Least-Heat Moon.