Askold Melnyczuk and Peter Trachtenberg

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | Askold Melnyczuk and Peter Trachtenberg  will read as part of the Writers Reading Series.  

Askold Melnyczuk has received a Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest grant in fiction, as well as the McGinnis Prize in fiction. His first novel was a New York Times Notable, his second was an LA Times Best Books of the Year selection, and the most recent was chosen by the American Libraries Association’s Booklist as an Editor’s Choice. He has received the Magid Prize from PEN for his work as founding editor of AGNI and in 2011 was honored by AWP with the George Garret Award. His recent work has appeared in Glimmer Train, The Antioch Review, The Massachusetts Review, and The Denver Quarterly. An associate professor in the MFA program at the University of Massachusetts, he also teaches at the Bennington Writing Seminars and has taught at Boston University and Harvard. A chapter from his new novel, Excerpts from Smedley’s Secret Guide to World Literature, Part I, by Jonathan Levy Wainwright IV, age 15, has been published as a chapbook by Anomolous Press, and new work is out or forthcoming in The Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Antioch Review, and The Gettysburg Review. 

Peter Trachtenberg is the author of 7 Tattoos, The Book of Calamities, and Another Insane Devotion, a 2012 New York Times Editors’ Choice. His essays, journalism, and short fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, A Public Space, Bidoun, and The New York Times' travel magazine, with work forthcoming in The Virginia Quarterly Review and Story Quarterly. His honors include the Whiting Award, the Nelson Algren Award for Short Fiction, a Guggenheim fellowship, and a residency at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center. He is an associate professor in the writing program of the University of Pittsburgh.