DENTON (UNT), Texas -- Novelist and essayist Jo Ann Beard will open the University of North Texas' 2014-2015 Visiting Writers Series with a reading on Sept. 25 (Thursday). She will be followed by poet and essayist Dan Beachy-Quick, who will host a reading on Oct. 7 (Tuesday).
Sept. 25 (Thursday)
4 p.m. -- Question-and-answer session for students, Room 204, UNT's Curry Hall, 200 Avenue A
8 p.m. -- Reading and book signing, Room 180, UNT's Business Leadership Building, 1307 W. Highland St.
Beard received national attention for "The Fourth State of Matter," a personal essay on the 1991 shooting in the University of Iowa's physics department, where Beard worked at the time as an editor for a physics journal. She was a colleague of the four faculty members who died before the gunman, a graduate student, killed himself. "The Fourth State of Matter" was originally published in The New Yorker in 1996 and included in the 1997 edition of "Best American Essays." Beard included it in her 1999 collection of autobiographical essays, "The Boys of My Youth." In 2011, she published a novel, "In Zanesville." Beard currently teaches at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York.
Oct. 7 (Tuesday)
4 p.m. -- Question-and-answer session for students, Forum on the first floor of UNT's Willis Library, 1506 W. Highland St.
8 p.m. -- Reading, Room A117, Life Sciences Complex, 1510 Chestnut St.
Beachy-Quick, a faculty member in the MFA writing program at Colorado State University, is the author of five books of poetry -- "Circle's Apprentice," "North True South Bright," "Spell," "Mulberry" and "This Nest, Swift Passerine." He has also written "A Whaler's Dictionary," a collection of linked essays responding to Herman Melville's "Moby Dick," and "Wonderful Investigations," a collection of essays, meditations and fairy tales. Beachy-Quick has collaborated with the poet Srikanth Reddy on "Conversities" and with essayist and performance artist Matthew Goulish on "Work From Memory."
Sponsored by the Creative Writing Program in the Department of English, the Visiting Writers Series brings approximately six nationally and internationally renowned writers to campus during the academic year to give free public readings of their work, and to also hold question-and-answer sessions with students. The Visiting Writers Series ends each April with a visit by the winner of that year's UNT Rilke Prize, a $10,000 prize recognizing a poetry collection from a mid-career writer that was published during the previous year.
For more information about these events, contact Lisa Vining in the Creative Writing Program at lisa.vining@unt.edu or 940-369-5981.