The Lewis Center for the Arts’ Program in Creative Writing continues its yearlong 80th anniversary celebration on October 16 with a reading by Aleksandar Hemon, a 2008 National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist, and Princeton Professor of Creative Writing, and Andrew Motion, the 1999-2009 U.K. Poet Laureate and cofounder of the online Poetry Archive. The reading is the next event in the Althea Ward Clark W’21 Reading Series and begins at 7:30 p.m. in Wallace Theater in the Lewis Arts complex on the Princeton University campus. The reading is free and open to the public.
Professor of Creative Writing Aleksandar Hemon. Photo by Velibor Božović.
Aleksandar Hemon is the author of The Lazarus Project, which was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award, and three collections of short stories: The Question of Bruno; Nowhere Man, which was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Love and Obstacles. His other works include two books of nonfiction, My Parents: An Introduction and The Book of My Lives, the novel The Making of Zombie Wars, journalism, screenplays, and content for the Netflix original show Sense8. Born in Sarajevo, Hemon visited Chicago in 1992, intending to stay for a matter of months. While he was there, Sarajevo came under siege, and he was unable to return home. Hemon wrote his first story in English in 1995. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003 and a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation in 2004. Hemon taught at Northwestern University and New York University before joining the Princeton faculty in fall 2018.
Andrew Motion, the 1999-2009 U.K. Poet Laureate and cofounder of the online Poetry Archive. Photo by Johnny Ring.
Andrew Motion’s works include the poetry collections Natural Causes (1987), Public Property (2002), and The Cinder Path (2009); nonfiction work that includes biographies on Philip Larkin (1993), John Keats (1997), and Thomas Wainewright (2000); and novels such as The Invention of Dr. Cake (2003), Silver: Return to Treasure Island (2012), and The New World (2015). He was born in London, raised in Stisted, Essex, and now lives in Baltimore, Maryland, where he was appointed Homewood Professor in the Arts at Johns Hopkins University in 2015. Motion served as Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1999 to 2009 and helped cofound the online Poetry Archive. In 2009, Motion was also knighted for his services to poetry.
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. The series is organized by Lecturer in Creative Writing and award-winning poet Michael Dickman. 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 2019-2020 series include:
- Andrey Kurkov and Sapphire on November 20.
- Joy Harjo and Sheila Heti on February 12.
- Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge and Yoko Tawada on March 4.
- Kaitlyn Greenidge, Helen Oyeyemi, and Nicole Sealey on April 15.
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.
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.
