2006-2007 Speakers
10/10/06, Tuesday
Known for her many-layered narratives, Amy Tan’s novels are standards on The New York Times hardcover best-seller lists. Her books explore the conflicts of living in several cultures, especially Chinese and American. Ms. Tan was born in Oakland, California, to Chinese immigrant parents. When she was fourteen, her father and brother died of brain tumors. Following the tragedy, her mother took her and her younger brother to Switzerland where she graduated from high school. “Reading [Amy Tan] is like peering into a carved ivory ball that contains numerous smaller balls, each revealing a different design but all worked from a single source,” says The NYT Book Review. In Ms. Tan’s case, best-seller takes on a new meaning; each of her books has spent weeks and weeks on The New York Times best-seller list. Saving Fish from Drowning, her newest novel, represents a change of venue for Ms. Tan. This book is set in Burma, now Myanmar, and through her American characters, she addresses human rights abuses
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11/13/06, Monday
Joyce Carol Oates began “writing novel after novel” when she was given a typewriter at age fourteen. Her prolific career includes publishing poetry, essays, dramas, young adult and children’s books, and more than forty novels, all while teaching. Ms. Oates has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys and Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award. She is a recipient of the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction and is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Princeton University since 1978. Ms. Oates grew up outside Lockport, New York, and has come to be one of the world’s most eminent authors, committing her life to teaching and writing. “When I’m with people I often fall into a kind of waking sleep, a daydreaming about the people, the strangers, who are to be the characters in a story or novel I will be writing. . . I try to put this all together, working very slowly, never hurrying the process. I can’t hurry it any more than I can prevent it.”
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02/13/07, Tuesday
A Romanian who has adopted a very American voice and style, Andrei Codrescu writes essays, poetry, fiction, memoirs, travelogues, and an award-winning film. He translates and edits anthologies, is a columnist for National Public Radio, all while serving as the MacCurdy Distinguished Professor of English at Louisiana State University. Mr. Codrescu left his birthplace when nineteen, and brings an outsider’s perspective to the absurdities of American culture with his trademark irony, buoyant paranoia and mystical illusion. His work addresses revolution, America, sex, Romania, and language on one hand, and puppets, food, fascists, airplanes, and Greyhounds on the other. By turns, he is funny and deadly serious. “Mr. Codrescu, with the deadpan burlesque of a jaded outsider, rightfully assumes his place among the keener chroniclers of the American spirit…his work is defined by the tensions at play between humor and sentiment, by one-liners and aphorism, and between immigrant optimism and dissident cynicism,” says The New York Times. Mr. Codrescu’s newest title is New Orleans, Mon Amour, a book of very short essays about his home for twenty years, in which he presents “finely-honed portraits of a fabled city and its equally fable inhabitants.”
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5/17/07, Tuesday
Widely regarded as the America's premier nature writer, Barry Lopez is an essayist, short-story writer and author of fifty-six books. He often writes about the relationship between the physical landscape and human culture. Among his nonfiction books are Arctic Dreams, for which he received the National Book Award, About This Life, and Of Wolves and Men, a National Book Award finalist. Matters of intimacy, ethics, and identity are themes of his fiction, which include award-winning works such as Field Notes, Winter Count, and a novella-length fable, Crow and Weasel, popular with young readers. Mr. Lopez has lived in Oregon for nearly forty years, leaving to travel to remote parts of the world, occasionally to teach and lecture. He was once an active landscape photographer and now maintains close ties with a diverse community of artists, collaborating in theater and concert productions, and speaking and writing about visual artists. He has developed fine press limited editions of books now in the permanent collections of The Whitney Museum, the New York Public Library and major universities. In another arena, he recently collaborated with E. O. Wilson in the design of a university curriculum that combines the sciences and humanities in a new undergraduate major.
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Amy Tan
