On Wednesday, November 14, Emmy Award-winning Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin and award-winning writer Caryl Phillips will read from their work as part of the Althea Ward Clark W’21 Reading Series of the Lewis Center for the Arts’ Program in Creative Writing. The reading, beginning at 7:30 p.m. in the Wallace Theater at the Lewis Arts complex on the Princeton University campus, is free and open to the public. In response to audience feedback, all readings for this year’s series will move from 4:30 p.m. to a 7:30 p.m. evening time slot.
Guy Maddin is a Canadian filmmaker with numerous shorts and 11 feature films to his credit, including the Emmy Award-winning ballet film Dracula – Pages From A Virgin’s Diary (2002); The Saddest Music in the World (2003); My Winnipeg (2007); and US National Society of Film Critics Best Experimental Film Prize-winners Archangel (1990) and The Heart of the World (2000). He is also a member of The Order of Canada & The Order of Manitoba.
Caryl Phillips was born in St.Kitts and raised in England. He is the author of numerous books of non-fiction and fiction. Dancing in the Dark won the 2006 PEN Open Book Award, and A Distant Shore won the 2004 Commonwealth Writers Prize. His other awards include the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Lannan Literary Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Crossing the River, which was also short-listed for the Booker Prize. He has written for the stage, television, and film, and is a contributor to newspapers and magazines on both sides of the Atlantic. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and holds honorary doctorates from a number of universities. He has taught at universities in Britain, Singapore, Ghana, Sweden and Barbados and is currently Professor of English at Yale University. His latest novel, A View of the Empire at Sunset, was published earlier this year.
Both guests will be introduced by Michael Dickman, faculty member in the Program in Creative Writing and author of The End of the West; Flies (winner of the 2011 James Laughlin Award); 50 American Plays, co-written with his brother, Matthew Dickman; Green Migraine; and Brother.
The Lewis Center’s Program in Creative Writing annually presents the Althea Ward Clark W’21 Reading Series, which provides an opportunity for students, as well as all in the greater Princeton region, to hear and meet the best contemporary writers. All readings are at 7:30 p.m. in venues in the Lewis Arts complex and are free and open to the public. Other readings scheduled in the 2018-2019 series include:
- Layli Long Soldier and Princeton Hodder Fellow Jacob Shores-Argüello on February 6 in the Hearst Dance Theater
- Frank Bidart and Yuri Herrera on March 6 in the Donald G. Drapkin Studio
- Han Kang and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o on April 17 in the Hearst Dance Theater
The series will also include readings of new work in December and May by selected students in Creative Writing courses and readings in May by seniors in the Program from the novels, collections of short stories, poems or translations, or screenplays written as their senior theses under mentorship by the Creative Writing faculty.
To learn more about this event, the Program in Creative Writing, and the more than 100 other performances, exhibitions, readings, screenings, concerts, and lectures presented each year by the Lewis Center, most of them free, visit arts.princeton.edu.