Announcement:
Eula Biss was just named a Finalist for the 2010 National Book Critics Circle award in Criticism.
Interview with Reg Gibbons about writing and teaching for the NU News Center. Plus an audio of him reading one of his poems.Director of the CWA, Reg Gibbons is featured a the "Chicagoan of the Year" for literature in the Chicago Tribune.
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Writers in Residence
ALEX KOTLOWITZ is the CWA Writer in Residence for Winter Quarter 2010. He is the award-winning author of There Are No Children Here, The Other Side of the River, and Never a City So Real. Contributor to The New York Times Magazine and public radio’s This American Life, Alex Kotlowitz is renowned for his narratives of particular individuals whose concrete life experiences illuminate broad aspects of our nation’s social and political landscape.
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Award-winning author Alex Kotlowitz talks violence on Chicago streets
Kotlowitz is the Winter Quarter Writer in Residence for the Northwestern University Center for the Writing Arts. The author is currently teaching two courses, a writing workshop and a course in the Medill School of Journalism.
Kotlowitz’s books include “There Are No Children Here”, “The Other Side of the River” and “Never a City So Real.” He has also written for several publications such as “The New York Times Magazine” and public radio and is currently working on two films.
“What makes all of this the career of one writer rather than of several is a certain steady vision in Alex’s work,” said Reginald Gibbons, CWA director. “(He has) a tremendous interest in and sympathy for ordinary people caught in unusually difficult circumstances. He also writes about people who have wit and grace and the vital energy to survive such struggles, and he has a deep curiosity about and affection for the urban realities of Chicago.”
Kotlowitz read from his creative essay “Khalid,” which told the true story of a Sudanese immigrant in Chicago who recently lost her teenage son to street violence. The piece was published last summer in an issue of British literary magazine Granta, devoted to Chicago.
The author said violence has been a theme that appears throughout his work. Although he has been accused by friends of finding himself in “very dark places,” Kotlowitz said he finds light in the people who manage to go on after being affected by violence.
Meriwether Clarke, a student in Kotlowitz’s writing class, said she attended the event because she has enjoyed his work.
“He is an amazing human being,” the Weinberg senior said.
While most of the event’s attendees were NU students or faculty, Chicago residents Kelli Wefenstette and Jimmy Thomas came to hear Kotlowitz read. They said they heard about the event in “Time Out Chicago” and attended because they’d both read and loved “There Are No Children Here.”
Wefenstette said Kotlowitz’s work is “enlightening,” and Thomas said he likes the “thick descriptions of individuals.”
Following the reading, Kotlowitz showed a 12-minute clip from his documentary about the “violence interrupters” from the CeaseFire campaign.
The CeaseFire campaign uses “credible messengers,” men with ties to the streets of Chicago who have “decided that there is a second act in life” to prevent shootings,
Kotlowitz said. He knew many of the men by reputation from his previous work, he added.
The documentary will air spring 2011 on the PBS investigative journalism series “Frontline.”
The common theme between his works is the struggle to understand violence, Kotlowitz said.
“(Murder) is the most extreme act that one human can commit against another,” he said. “What interests me is that somehow, whether they are the family member of a victim, a friend of a victim, or the perpetrator, they manage to go on.”
