Literature: Related Content

Visual arts faculty member Ann Pibal, MFA faculty member Major Jackson, and alumna Kiran Desai ’93 are among the 175 artists, scholars, and scientists—out of nearly 3,000 applicants—to receive 2013 Guggenheim Fellowships.

National Book Award-winning poet Mark Doty will read and discuss his work on Wednesday, April 24, at 7:00 pm in Bennington’s Tishman Lecture Hall. The event, part of the Poetry at Bennington reading and lecture series, is free and open to the public.

Two Bennington students have been invited to Bucknell University this summer, and two others to Skidmore College, for highly selective, nationally sought-after creative writing fellowships.

Undergraduate and MFA faculty member Benjamin Anastas' new memoir, Too Good to Be True—about having and losing it all, both in literature and life— “is smart and honest and searching,” raved one New York Times review, “…so plaintive and raw that most writers (and many readers) will finish it with heart palpitations.”

In his column in the Buenos Aires Herald, celebrated journalist and human rights hero Robert Cox dubbed faculty member Marguerite Feitlowitz's book on Argentina's infamous Dirty War "the most important book to appear so far on the consequences of the vicious cycle of terror and violence that enveloped Argentina in the 1970s." 

Man Booker Prize winner Kiran Desai ‘93 was one of six immigrant authors to share their coming-to-America story in a recent issue of The New Yorker. In her essay “Fatherland,” Desai discusses the guilt that she and many of her Indian peers felt when leaving their parents to immigrate to America.

Luke Mogelson’s investigative exposé on the alleged murders of three Afghan civilians by U.S. soldiers appears on the cover of the May 1 New York Times Magazine. Recently discharged from the National Guard, Mogelson was one of 10 writers out of nearly 1,900 applicants this year to receive the prestigious Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University’s creative writing program.

This isn't to suggest that military personnel are behaving similarly throughout Afghanistan as a result of the conditions there," Mogelson writes. "It is only to say that 10 years into an unconventional war whose end does not appear imminent, the murder of civilians by troops that are supposed to be defending them might reveal more than the deviance of a few young soldiers in a combat zone.

Read the entire article. 

For more information on the prestigious creative writing program, see Stanford's website. 

Bennington College has released the second annual edition of plain china, a first-of-its-kind anthology of premier fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and artwork selected from more than 30 American undergraduate literary journals. Featuring work from the University of Georgia, Harvard, Louisiana State University, Princeton, Oberlin, Rice, Susquehanna, Stanford, and Vassar, the anthology is the only national online compilation of undergraduate writing today.

Literature faculty member Katie Peterson was one of 14 artists and the only poet to be awarded an unrestricted $25,000 grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts this year.

Iconic writer Bret Easton Ellis '86 was on Northeast Public Radio last week promoting his new novel Imperial Bedrooms, the sequel to his bestselling debut Less Than Zero, which, published by Vintage in 1985, launched the 21-year-old Bennington student into literary stardom.

Alumna Sarah Stanbury '71 has been awarded a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship for her ongoing work in medieval English literature. An English professor at the College of the Holy Cross, Stanbury's work examines what manmade objects in the work of Chaucer tell us about the people and period.

PEN New England has named author Gretel Ehrlich ‘67 winner of the 2010 Henry David Thoreau Prize for Literary Excellence in Nature Writing.

"Be enthusiastic about your work, but always stay humble," filmmaker Mitchell Lichtenstein '78 told a room full of Bennington students as part of the "Beyond Bennington" speaker series, which invites alumni to campus to discuss their careers with current students.

Bennington College has launched a first-of-its-kind anthology of premier fiction, poetry, and nonfiction selected from more than 40 American undergraduate literary journals. Featuring work from Brown, Boston College, UCLA, the University of Chicago, Harvard, Princeton, Oberlin, Stanford, and Tulane, among others, plain china: Best Undergraduate Writing 2009 is the only national online compilation of undergraduate writing.

A television series conceived by Savannah Dooley ‘07 when she was a student at Bennington has been picked up by ABC Family and will air on the network this summer.

The National Endowment of the Arts has awarded author and faculty member Doug Bauer a $25,000 grant in support of his ongoing work in contemporary literature.

Author and legendary editor Judith Jones '45 was a guest on NPR's Here and Now earlier this month to discuss her new book, The Pleasures of Cooking For One.

Author Jonathan Lethem '86's new novel Chronic City was hailed as "astonishing" this week in The New York Times Sunday Book Review.

Following President Obama's speech on health care reform, author Michael Pollan '76 urged legislators to consider the impact of the food industry on the state of the current system.

Author and longtime Knopf editor Judith Jones '45, who helped launch Julia Child's career, and the late Dorothy Cousins '39, Child's sister, are both portrayed in Julie & Julia, a new movie based on the cooking icon's life.

Bestselling author and Bennington alumna Kathleen Norris '69 will speak and read from selected works on Thursday, March 26, at 7:30 p.m. in the College's Deane Carriage Barn. The event—this year's Candace DeVries Olesen '50 Lectureship for Distinguished Alumni—is free and open to the public.

According to a recent article in The Boston Globe, fewer novels today are being adapted for film, making novelists who have found success in the Hollywood marketplace, such as faculty member Rebecca Godwin, increasingly rare.

San Francisco Chronicle food and wine editor Michael Bauer dedicated a recent blog entry to author and longtime Alfred A. Knopf editor Judith Jones '45, whose latest memoir, The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food, has received favorable reviews from The New York Times and elsewhere.

During a post-Katrina panel discussion with a group of New Orleans-based artists in early 2006, Dan Cameron '79, then-senior curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, just blurted it out: "A biennial would go really, really well in New Orleans."  

Booker Prize-winning author Kiran Desai '93 was one of sixteen Indian writers who traveled across the country to document the HIV/AIDS crisis for the new book AIDS Sutra: Untold Stories from India.

Michael Pollan ’76 seems to have stirred the political pot with his much-read column in The New York Times asking the next U.S. president to rethink the nation’s food policy. President Barack Obama cited Pollan’s piece at length in a pre-election interview with Time Magazine:

Bennington psychology faculty member David Anderegg will read from his new book Nerds: Who They Are and Why We Need More of Them at the Northshire Bookstore in Manchester, Vermont on Thursday, May 15, 2008.