Fulton, Viramontes to read from their work Feb. 9


Provided
Alice Fulton, left, and Helena María Viramontes will read from their recent poetry and fiction in Klarman Hall.

The Spring 2017 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series begins Thursday, Feb. 9, with award-winning faculty writers Alice Fulton and Helena María Viramontes in the Richard Cleaveland Memorial Reading at 4:30 p.m. in Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, Klarman Hall.

Presented by the Department of English Creative Writing Program, the reading is free and open to the public. Books will be available for purchase from Buffalo Street Books, and a book signing and free, catered reception in the English Department Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall, will follow the reading.

Fulton, MFA ’82, is a poet, essayist and fiction writer, and the Ann S. Bowers Professor of English at Cornell. She studied poetry at Cornell with A.R. Ammons, Phyllis Janowitz, Kenneth McClane and Robert Morgan in the Creative Writing Program, and taught at the University of Michigan before joining the Cornell faculty in 2000.

Her honors include an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature (2011), a MacArthur Foundation fellowship in 1991, the Library of Congress’s biennial Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry (for “Felt,” 2001), and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

She is the author of nine books, including the poetry collections “Barely Composed” (2015) and “Sensual Math” (1995) and a 2008 collection of 10 linked stories, “The Nightingales of Troy.” She has written extensively on poetics, and critics have noted her poetry’s use of scientific metaphor and its “innovative approach to line and language, as well as the variety and depth of its content,” with “an extraordinary range of topics, perspectives and voices,” according to the Poetry Foundation.

Viramontes will read from the manuscript in progress of her third novel, “The Cemetery Boys.” A professor of English and director of the Creative Writing Program, her short stories and essays are widely anthologized and used in secondary school and university classes. Her most recent novel, “Their Dogs Came with Them,” is being adapted for the stage. Her fiction also includes “The Moths and Other Stories” and “Under the Feet of Jesus,” and she is co-editor of two essay collections: “Chicana (W)rites: On Word and Film” and “Chicana Creativity and Criticism.”

Recently awarded a 2017 Bellagio Literary Arts Residency from the Rockefeller Foundation, Viramontes also is a recipient of a United States Artists Ford Fellowship in Literature, the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature and a Sundance Institute Fellowship. Before joining Cornell, she was a community organizer and the coordinator of the Los Angeles Latino Writers Association.

The annual Cleaveland Reading was created in 2002 by family and friends of Richard Cleaveland ’74. Other readings in the series this semester (all in the Klarman Hall auditorium unless noted) also include acclaimed “weird fiction” writer Jeff VanderMeer, March 16; the Eamon McEneaney Memorial Reading with Irish poet Eamon Grennan, April 13 in Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall; and poet and critic Lisa Russ Spaar, April 27. 

Media Contact

Rebecca Valli