2018-19 Raymond Carver Reading Series Begins with Celebrated Poet Nicole Sealey

Nicole Sealey (Photo by Rachel Eliza Griffiths)

Author Nicole Sealey launches the 2018-19 Raymond Carver Reading Series on Wednesday, Sept. 19. She will take part in a Q&A at 3:45 p.m. and an author reading at 5:30 p.m., both in Huntington Beard Crouse Hall’s Gifford Auditorium.

The series is presented by the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing in the Department of English in the College of Arts and Sciences. The events are free and open to the public. Parking is available in SU pay lots.

Sealey is executive director of the Cave Canem Foundation and the 2018-19 Doris Lippman Visiting Poet at The City College of New York. She is author of “Ordinary Beast” (HarperCollins, 2017), finalist for the 2018 PEN Open Book Award, and “The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named” (Northwestern University Press, 2016), winner of the 2015 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize.

Her other honors include a Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant, an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from The American Poetry Review, a Daniel Varoujan Award and the Poetry International Prize, as well as fellowships from CantoMundo, the Cave Canem Foundation, MacDowell Colony and the Poetry Project.

Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times and elsewhere.

Born in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, and raised in Apopka, Florida, Sealey holds an M.L.A. degree in Africana studies from the University of South Florida and an M.F.A. degree in creative writing from New York University.

In total, six authors will appear in the fall half of the Raymond Carver Reading Series. In addition to Sealey, participants are:

Arthur Flowers, Sept. 26
SU associate professor of English
novelist, essayist, performance poet
“I See the Promised Land”
“Mojo Rising: Confessions of a 21st Century Conjureman”

Robert Lopez, Oct. 10
Visiting Writer
novelist, poet
“Part of the World”
“Kamby Bolongo Mean River”

Katie Kitamura, Oct. 24
The Leonard and Elise Elman Visiting Writer
novelist
“A Separation”
“The Longshot”

Mary Karr, Nov. 7
SU Peck Professor of Literature
memoirist, poet
“The Liar’s Club”
“Tropic of Squalor”

George Saunders, Dec. 5
SU professor of English
The Jane and Daniel Present Lecturer
short-story writer, novelist
“Lincoln in the Bardo”
“Tenth of December”

The Raymond Carver Reading Series is supported by the College of Arts and Sciences, Stephen King, the Dr. Scholl Foundation, the Lynn & David Pleet ’53 Fund for Creative Writing, the Richard Elman Visiting Writer Fund, the Friends of Creative Writing, Chris Tennyson, Jerome Cohen, Jane and Daniel Present, Don McNaughton, and the Interdisciplinary Fund for the Humanities from Leonard and Elise Elman.