Description:
Sara Peters’ visionary debut collection is a book about obsessions — about desire, violence, sex, beauty, and cruelty, about how they lace through our days, leaving us changed. In these startling poems of mystery and terror, we meet remarkable characters enduring unspeakable things, confronting the raw reality of existence through fearless candor. With profound clarity, elegance, and humour, Sara Peters reminds us of the harrowing and beautiful complexity of life itself. 1996 marks the undeniable arrival of an essential and brave new voice.

Description:
In his brilliant, haunting novel, Stegner Fellow and Whiting Award winner Anthony Marra transports us to a snow-covered village in Chechnya, where eight-year-old Havaa watches from the woods as Russian soldiers abduct her father in the middle of the night, accusing him of aiding Chechen rebels. Across the road their lifelong neighbor and family friend Akhmed has also been watching, fearing the worst when the soldiers set fire to Havaa’s house. But when he finds her hiding in the forest with a strange blue suitcase, he makes a decision that will forever change their lives. He will seek refuge at the abandoned hospital where the sole remaining doctor, Sonja Rabina, treats the wounded.
For the talented, tough-minded Sonja, the arrival of Akhmed and Havaa is an unwelcome surprise. Weary and overburdened, she has no desire to take on additional risk and responsibility. And she has a deeply personal reason for caution: harboring these refugees could easily jeopardize the return of her missing sister. But over the course of five extraordinary days, Sonja’s world will shift on its axis and reveal the intricate pattern of connections that weave together the pasts of these three unlikely companions and unexpectedly decides their fate. A story of the transcendent power of love in wartime, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is a work of sweeping breadth, profound compassion, and lasting significance.

Anne Carson Colloquium, The Mohr Visiting Poet

Date: Wednesday, 5/15/13
Time: 11:00 am
NOTE NEW LOCATION: Bechtel Conference Center, Encina Hall

T.C. Boyle Colloquium, Part of the Lane Lecture Series

Date: Tuesday, 5/7/13
Time: 11:00am
Location: Terrace Room (4th floor, Margaret Jacks Hall)

A Reading by T.C. Boyle, Part of the Lane Lecture Series

Event Details:

Date: Monday, 5/6/13
Time: 8:00pm
Location: Cemex Auditorium, Zambrano Hall, Knight Management Center (Click here for map)

Bio:

T.C. Boyle is the author of fourteen novels, including World’s End, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award; The Road to Wellville; The Tortilla Curtain; Drop City; The Women; When the Killing’s Done; and, most recently, San Miguel.  He has also written ten short story collections, including T.C. Boyle Stories II, the second volume of his collected stories, forthcoming in the fall of 2013.  He earned his M.F.A. and Ph.D. degrees at Iowa and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  He lives near Santa Barbara and is Distinguished Professor of English at USC, where he founded the undergraduate program in creative writing.

A Reading by The Mohr Visiting Poet, Anne Carson

Event Details:

Date: Wednesday, 5/1/13
Time: 8:00pm
Location: Cemex Auditorium, Zambrano Hall, Knight Management Center (Click here for map)

Bio:

Anne Carson was born in Canada and teaches ancient Greek for a living. Her awards and honors include the Lannan Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Griffin Trust Award for Excellence in Poetry, a Guggenheim fellowship, and the MacArthur “Genius” Award.

Tomasz Różycki’s sixth book of poetry, Colonies, is an exploration of collective memory in fiercely exacting poems. The book’s seventy-seven sonnets, here translated from Polish by Mira Rosenthal, give a feel for the poet’s obsession with form and fixation on the historical legacy of Central Europe—preoccupations that have fueled his work from the beginning and marked him as a true successor to an extraordinary literary tradition. Różycki has developed a distinctive personal poetic voice that both embraces and questions the literary legacy of poets writing in the twenty-first century.

A Reading by Stegner Fellows, Hugh Martin & Monique Wentzel

Event Details:

Date: Wednesday, 4/24/13
Time: 7:00pm
Location: Terrace Room (4th floor, Margaret Jacks Hall)