A reading and discussion on the novel Loving Frank with author Nancy Horan

Nancy Horan's debut novel Loving Frank delves into the life of legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright during the years of 1907-1914 and has already been called "the buzziest serious novel of the summer" ( New York magazine).

In Loving Frank, Horan beautifully blends fact and fiction in her novel about the relationship between Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Borthwick Cheney, the wife of a couple whose home Wright built in 1904. Frank and Mamah began a clandestine affair that eventually led them to leave their families behind and flee to Europe, devastating their loved ones, stunning Chicago society, and making headlines across the country. When the couple returned to America, Wright built the first Taliesin for his beloved Mamah. The end of their affair was as shocking as it was tragic, but is not known to most people today. Based on seven years of meticulous research, Loving Frank does a remarkable job of bringing to life both Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Cheney, particularly the conflicts and sacrifices Mamah was forced to make as she grappled with her roles as mother, wife, lover, and intellectual. Nancy Horan, a former journalist and longtime resident of Oak Park, Illinois, now lives and writes on an island in Puget Sound. Visit her website at www.lovingfrank.com.

Symposium: The Black Arts Movement in the Broader Legacy of the Civil Rights Movement

The aim of the symposium is to bring together writers and activists from that era to talk about the influential alignments and cross-currents among them and tell us what goals we can now understand as shared even if the means differed at that time. The impact of that era on African American literature has been called a "furious flowering." A clear discussion of the insights from this past is necessary for us to continue forward with this harvest.

The symposium will focus on the midwestern centers of the movement. The panelists will be Angela Jackson, poet, novelist and playwright; Sterling Plumpp, poet, scholar, editor and activist; Carolyn Rodgers, poet, feminist and educator; and Sala Udin, Freedom Rider, actor in the establishment of the Pittsburgh Black Horizons Theatre, under the direction of his childhood friends, Rob Penny and August Wilson, elected member of the Pittsburgh City Council, where he served for 11 years.

A reception will follow the presentations.

Co-sponsored by the Center for the Writing Arts, the Department of The African-American Studies, English Department, Political Science Department, and the Weinberg School of Arts and Sciences

A reading from, Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City

Professor of African American Studies, Chair & Professor of Sociology, Arthur E. Andersen Teaching and Research Professor

Pattillo's areas of interest include race and ethnicity (specifically the black middle class), urban sociology, and qualitative methods. Pattillo uses the city of Chicago as her laboratory and strives to be an expert in Chicago history, politics, and social life. In her book, Black Picket Fences, Pattillo investigates the economic, spatial, and cultural forces that affect child-rearing and youth socialization in a black middle class neighborhood on Chicago's South Side. Black Picket Fences won the Oliver Cromwell Cox Best Book Award from the American Sociological Association. She has published articles in American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Ethnic and Racial Studies, and other journals. She is also co-editor of Imprisoning America: The Social Effects of Mass Incarceration. Her most recent book, Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City examines the simultaneous processes of low-income housing construction and gentrification in a black Chicago neighborhood. Pattillo is a founding board member and active participant in Urban Prep Charter Academy, the first all-boys public charter high school in Chicago.

Spoken word poetry reading of his work with musical accompaniment

Fall Quarter 2007 Visiting Writer in Residence for the Center for the Writing Arts, teaching the Art of Poetry: Revision and Experimentation.

Ed Roberson is the author of seven volumes of poetry, including Voices Cast Out to Talk Us In, winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize; Just In: Word of Navigational Change: New and Selected Work; Atmosphere Conditions , a National Poetry Series winner; and his most recent book, City Eclogue. His honors include a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writer's Award.

Our visitors from Indonesia, Egypt, Russia, Hong Kong, Bulgaria, and Australia, are currently in residence at the International Writing Workshop at the University of Iowa. The writers will present brief readings of their work in translation, and a discussion will follow.

Students, faculty and the public are invited. A reception will follow in the same room.

International Day of Writing

This International Day of Writing is intended to supplement the rich Northwestern course offerings in creative writing by making accessible to students, faculty and the public several writers from different countries where literary practices, apprenticeships, careers and culture are different from what we are familiar with in this country. This day-long event is part of a continuing Center for the Writing Arts focus on internationalizing and diversifying our understanding of the writing of fiction, poetry and creative nonfiction, and our understanding of the writer.

Guest writers are:
Nirwan Dewanto, Indonesia
Hamdy El Gazzar, Egypt
Ksenia Golubovich, Russia
Lawrence Pun, Hong Kong
Aziz Nazmi Shakir-Tash, Bulgaria
Lindsay Simpson, Australia

A Conversation with Author Michael Lesy

Michael Lesy

Hampshire College Professor of Literary Journalism Michael Lesy is among the inaugural United States Artists Fellows. Lesy, who has taught at Hampshire College since 1990, has published a dozen books, ranging from Wisconsin Death Trip, which has been in print since it first appeared in 1973, to his most recent book, Murder City:The Bloody History of Chicago in the Twenties , released in 2007.

Lesy holds a doctorate in American cultural history from Rutgers University, master's degree from the University of Wisconsin, and bachelor's degree from Columbia University.

Style and Substance: Reporting on Popular Culture

Alex Kuczynski

Style reporter for The New York Times and author of Beauty Junkies: Inside Our $15 Million Obsession with Cosmetic Surgery

Lecture by Ed Roberson, Ecopoetics in Ed Roberson's "City Ecloque"

Fall Quarter 2007 Visiting Writer in Residence for the Center for the Writing Arts, teaching the Art of Poetry: Revision and Experimentation.

Ecopoetic theory sees the world of human existence as resting in, on or arising, precipitating out of the Earth. The world is not the same as earth. The world is our experience and the structure of that knowledge in which we live and that lives as part of a larger life, the Earth. The nature poem occurs when a sense of the Earth enters into the world of human knowledge. The main understanding that results from this encounter is that the world's desires do not drive the Earth, but the Earth does run the world. "City Eclogue" proposes that we have a similar relationship to our cities. Just as the Earth has a larger, unknowable aspect beyond the world, the city has its own hidden aspect in every part of it we experience and touch. Ed Roberson will talk about how his early experiences as a research assistant in Alaska and Bermuda, and his expedition experiences in the Amazon and the Andes informed his ecopoetic.

Ed Roberson is the author of seven volumes of poetry, including Voices Cast Out to Talk Us In, winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize; Just In: Word of Navigational Change: New and Selected Work; Atmosphere Conditions , a National Poetry Series winner; and his most recent book, City Eclogue. His honors include a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writer's Award.