News and Information
Emory University
Atlanta, GA 30322

Release date: June 24, 1999
Contact: Deb Hammacher, Assistant Director

404-727-0644/dhammac@emory.edu

EMORY'S CREATIVE WRITING PROGRAM HOSTS ANNUAL SUMMER WRITERS' FESTIVAL JULY 20-22

Emory University's Creative Writing Program will host its annual Summer Writers' Festival July 20-22 that will feature readings and a panel discussion by writers Jim Shepard, Kevin Young, Beth Lordan and Mark Jarman. Author Judson Mitcham, director of Emory's Summer Writers' Institute, will moderate the panel discussion. All events are free and open to the public. For more information, call 404-727-4683.

The festival schedule is as follows:

o 8 p.m. Tuesday, July 20

Readings by Jim Shepard and Kevin Young.

303 Geosciences, 1557 Pierce Dr., Emory.

o 4 p.m. Wednesday, July 21

"Becoming a Writer" panel discussion featuring Shepard, Young, Lordan and Jarman with Mitcham moderating.

120 Tarbutton Hall, 1555 Pierce Dr., Emory.

o 8 p.m. Wednesday, July 21

Readings by students in the Summer Writers' Institute.

303 Geosciences, 1557 Pierce Dr., Emory.

o 8 p.m. Thursday, July 22

Readings by Beth Lordan and Mark Jarman

303 Geosciences, 1557 Pierce Dr., Emory.

Jim Shepard is the author of five novels-Flights (1983), Paper Doll (1986), Lights Out in the Reptile House (1990), Kiss of the Wolf (1994) and Nosferatu (1998), and a collection of stories, Batting Against Castro (1996). His short stories have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper's and The Paris Review among others, and in a number of anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories (1994). Shepard is the J. Leland Miller Professor of English at Williams College, where he teaches creative writing and film.

Kevin Young is the author of Most Way Home (1995), which was selected for the National Poetry Series and later received the John Zacharis Award for the best first book of poetry by Ploughshares magazine. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Grand Street, Callaloo, Kenyon Review and Hambone, and he has received numerous fellowships from the MacDowell Colony. He recently was featured on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered." Young is a graduate of Harvard, where he won the Academy of American Poets Prize, and the Brown University Creative Writing Program. He has been a member of The Darkroom Collective, and in 1998 he was named by Swing magazine as one of the 30 most powerful people under age 30 in the United States.

For author Beth Lordan the path to fiction writing began amid the study of bugs. Lordan worked as a secretary in Cornell University's department of entomology for 14 years, during which time she discovered an attraction to short story writing. In 1984, after a stint in the classics department, the 37-year-old mother of three traded her secretary's desk for a student's pen, enrolling in Cornell's graduate writing program. Lordan's first novel, August Heat, was published by Harper & Row in 1987. Her short fiction has appeared in Farmers Market, Gettysburg Review and The Atlantic Monthly. She also has published the collection And Both Shall Row (1998), which was one of The New York Times Notable Books. A product of small towns in the Northeast, Lordan writes lyrically of small-town living, and pays particular attention to the mystery she senses underlying the air of familiarity among inhabitants of such communities. She now teaches fiction writing at Southern Illinois University, where she was named director of the creative writing department in 1992.

Mark Jarman is the author of five collections of poetry, and a book-length narrative poem, Iris. With David Mason, he has edited Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism, and with Robert McDowell, he has written The Reaper Essays. His book The Black Riviera won the 1991 Poets' Prize. Questions for Ecclesiastes was a finalist for the 1997 National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry. His forthcoming works are a book of criticism, The Secret of Poetry, and a collection of poetry, Unholy Sonnets. He is a professor of English at Vanderbilt University.

Judson Mitcham's first book of poems, Somewhere in Ecclesiastes, won the Devins Award from the University of Missouri Press. His novel The Sweet Everlasting (1996) won the 1998 Townsend Prize and was a finalist for the Southern Book Award. He is chairman of the psychology department at Fort Valley State College, and he serves as adjunct professor of creative writing at Emory University and the University of Georgia.