Award-Winning Author John R. Keene to Give Reading at Bard College on March 10

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.—On Thursday, March 10, John R. Keene, the celebrated and award-winning author of books, including Annotations and, most recently, Counternarratives, will read from his work at Bard College. Introduced by Mary Caponegro ’78, director of the Program in Written Arts, and followed by a Q&A, this event takes place at 6 p.m. in Weis Cinema, Bertelsmann Campus Center. It is free and open to the public; no tickets or reservations are required. Books will be available for sale and signing from Oblong Books & Music.
 
“An extraordinary work of literature. John Keene is a dense, intricate, and magnificent writer,” writes Harper’s of Counternarratives, a collection of stories and novellas that draw upon memoirs, newspaper accounts, detective stories, interrogation transcripts, and speculative fiction to create new and strange perspectives on our past and present. “An Outtake” chronicles an escaped slave’s take on liberty and the American Revolution. “The Strange History of Our Lady of the Sorrows” presents a bizarre series of events that unfold in a 19th-century Kentucky convent. “The Aeronauts” soars between bustling Philadelphia, still-rustic Washington, and the theater of the U.S. Civil War. In “Acrobatique,” the subject of a famous Edgar Degas painting talks back. And the hotly debated, widely praised story “Rivers” presents a free Jim meeting up decades later with his former raftmate, Huckleberry Finn.
 
John R. Keene was born in St. Louis in 1965. He graduated from the St. Louis Priory School, Harvard College, and New York University, where he was a New York Times Fellow. In 1989, Keene joined the Dark Room Writers Collective, and is a graduate fellow of the Cave Canem Writers Workshops. In addition to Annotations and Counternarratives, both published by New Directions, he is the author of several other works, including the poetry collection Seismosis, with artist Christopher Stackhouse, and a translation of Brazilian author Hilda Hilst’s novel Letters from a Seducer. His honors include a 2003 New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, a 2005 Whiting Foundation Award in Fiction and Poetry, and a 2008 Fellowship for Distinguished First Poetry Collection from the inaugural Pan-African Literary Forum. He teaches at Rutgers University–Newark.
 
For more information about this event, call 845-758-7054 or e-mail [email protected].(2.25.16)
 

This event was last updated on 03-01-2016

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