Yale Bulletin and Calendar

April 13, 2007|Volume 35, Number 25

Three award-winning alumni writers
will read from their works

Three Yale alumni authors will read from their works at 5 p.m. on Monday, April 16, in St. Anthony Hall, 483 College St.

The event, sponsored by the Department of English's Creative Writing Concentration, is free and open to the public.

The featured writers will be poet, essayist and playwright Elizabeth Alexander '84 B.A.; playwright John Guare '63 M.F.A.; and novelist Claire Messud '87 B.A.

Elizabeth Alexander

Alexander, professor of African-American studies at Yale, is the author of four books of poems: "The Venus Hottentot," "Body of Life," "Antebellum Dream Book" and "American Sublime," which was one of three finalists for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize. She has also published a collection of essays titled "The Black Interior." She is the inaugural winner of the $50,000 Jackson Poetry Prize, and her many other honors include the Alphonse Fletcher Sr. Fellowship for work that "contributes to improving race relations in American society and furthers the broad social goals of the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954." She lives in New Haven.

John Guare

Guare is the author of the plays "The House of Blue Leaves," "Rich and Famous," "Marco Polo Sings a Solo," "Moon Over Miami," "Landscape of the Body," "Bosoms and Neglect," "Lake Hollywood," "A Few Stout Individuals" and "Six Degrees of Separation," among others. He wrote the screenplay for Louis Malle's film "Atlantic City" and the libretto (with Mel Shapiro) for the musical "Two Gentlemen of Verona." He also revised the book of the Cole Porter musical comedy "Kiss Me, Kate" for its Broadway revival. He was a founding member in 1965 of the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut, and is a council member of the Dramatists Guild, co-editor of the Lincoln Center Theater Review and co-producer of the New Plays Reading Room Series at the Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts. His plays have been recognized with Tony Awards, the Obie Award and New York Drama Critics Circle Awards.

Claire Messud

Messud is the author of the novels "When the World Was Steady" (nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award), "The Last Life," "The Hunters" and "The Emperor's Children" (listed for the 2006 Man Booker Prize). Her work has been recognized by the American Academy of Arts and Letters with two awards. Born in the United States, Messud grew up in Australia and Canada, returning to the United States as a teenager. She has taught creative writing at Amherst College, Warren Wilson College and Johns Hopkins University. Messud was considered for the 2003 Granta Best of Young British Novelists list -- despite the fact that none of the three passports she held was British. She lives in Massachusetts.

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Campus Notes