U.S. award winning writers to visit Zimbabwe
U.S. award winning writers to visit Zimbabwe
Harare, July 25th 2012: Five American award-winning authors from the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program (IWP) – which will host Zimbabwean writer Christopher Mlalazi in August 2012 – will visit Zimbabwe next week to facilitate writing and capacity-building seminars as well as exchange readings of their works with Zimbabwean artists.
The visit was designed to coincide with the Zimbabwe International Book Fair, which the group will be supporting through an event Friday, August 3 at the Harare City Council Flag Room. During that event they will donate books and Kindle e-readers to the Harare City Library in support of the developing culture of reading and writing in Zimbabwe. The visitors will also participate in the Youth Cultural Arts Festival (YOCAF) in Masvingo, offering workshops, readings, and attending cultural events.
The writers include Ellen Dore Watson, Camille T Dungy, Thomas Mallon, Christopher Merrill and Bob Schacochis; they will be accompanied Kelly Bedeian, Program Officer at the University of Iowa.
Ellen Doré Watson currently serves as Director of the Poetry Centre at Smith College, poetry and translation editor of The Massachusetts Review, and is a core faculty member at Drew University’s Low-Residency MFA Programme in Poetry and Translation.
Camille T. Dungy is currently a professor in the Creative Writing Department at San Francisco State University. She is author of poetry collections Smith Blue, Suck on the Marrow, and What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison. She is editor of Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, co-editor of From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great, and assistant editor of Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade.
Thomas Mallon currently directs the Creative Writing program at The George Washington University in Washington, D. C. His work appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Book Review and other publications. He received a PhD in English and American Literature from Harvard University, and taught for a number of years at Vassar College
Christopher Merrill’s books include four collections of poetry, Brilliant Water, Workbook, Fevers & Tides, and Watch Fire, for which he received the Peter I. B. Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets; translations of Ales Debeljak’s Anxious Moments and The City and the Child; several edited volumes, among them, The Forgotten Language: Contemporary Poets and Nature and From the Faraway Nearby: Georgia O’Keeffe as Icon; and five books of non-fiction, The Tree of the Doves: Ceremony, Expedition, War, Things of the Hidden God: Journey to the Holy Mountain, The Grass of Another Country: A Journey Through the World of Soccer, The Old Bridge: The Third Balkan War and the Age of the Refugee, and Only the Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Wars. His work has been translated into 25 languages.
Bob Shacochis is a novelist, essayist, journalist and educator. His work has received a National Book Award for First Fiction, the Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. A contributing editor for Harper’s Magazine and Outside Magazine, he has written op-ed commentaries on the US military, Haiti, and Florida politics for the New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. A travel memoir of his journeys in the Himalaya, Kingdoms in the Air, will be published in 2012; a novel-in-progress, The Woman Who Lost Her Soul, will appear in 2013.
Zimbabwean Christopher Mlalazi will begin a residency program at the University of Iowa’s prestigious program beginning this August for ten weeks. Award-winning Mlalazi, a published author with two books to his credit, will become the first Zimbabwean participant to the elite and highly competitive residency program since 2002. Four Zimbabwean writers Chirikurue Chirikure (1990), Charles Mungoshi (1991), Chiedza Musengezi (1993) and Freedom Nyamubaya (2002) have participated since the program was established in 1967. The goal of the IWP is to provide authors the time to write, read, translate study, conduct research, travel, give readings, and also be part of the vibrant literary and academic community of the University of Iowa, a major American research institution in Iowa city, the only American city designated as a UNESCO City of Literature.
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