Two award-winning writers will be visiting Canisius this October under the auspices on the Contemporary Writers Series.
On Tuesday, October 8, at 7:00 p.m., in the Montante Cultural Center, Clair Wills will give the 20th Annual Hassett Reading. She is the King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge. Her books include Lovers and Strangers: An Immigrant History of Post-War Britain, winner of the Irish Times International Non-Fiction Book of the Year, and That Neutral Island: A Cultural History of Ireland During the Second World War, winner of the PEN Hessell-Tiltman History Prize. Wills’ most recent book is Missing Persons, or, My Grandmother’s Secrets. She is a frequent contributor to the London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, and other publications.
On Tuesday, October 29, at 7:00 p.m., in the Grupp Fireside Lounge, Kao Kalia Yang will read and discuss her work. She was born in a refugee camp in Thailand and came to America at the age of six. She earned a BA from Carleton College and an MFA in creative nonfiction writing from Columbia. Yang is the author of The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir, a finalist for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award and the Asian American Literary Award and winner of a Minnesota Book Award; The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Chautauqua Prize, and a Dayton Literary Peace Prize; and most recently, Where Rivers Part: A Story of My Mother’s Life. She has been awarded fellowships by the McKnight, Paul and Daisy Soros, and Guggenheim Foundations.
You can learn more about both authors and events and find instructions how to livestream on the writers series homepage: www.canisius.edu/writers
Submitted by: Mick Cochrane, Professor, English
