Nonfiction under Oath April 13, 2010

Why is nonfiction defined in the negative and how might it be revalued for its own sake? Join three pioneering nonfiction writers as they read from new work and discuss the challenges and rewards of working in prose. John D'Agata teaches creative writing at the University of Iowa; his new book, About a Mountain, is a book-length essay on nuclear waste and suicide in Las Vegas, Nevada. David Shields, who teaches English at the University of Washington and Creative Writing at Warren Wilson College, is most recently the author of Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, an ars poetica of writing "truthiness" in an unbearably artificial world. Brenda Wineapple is the Director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the Graduate Center, CUNY and the author, most recently, of White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Her anthology, 19th Century American Writers on Writing (series editor Edward Hirsch) will be published next fall, and she's currently writing a book about America, 1848-1877. Moderated by Wayne Koestenbaum, poet, novelist, and professor of English at The Graduate Center, CUNY, who is currently working on a nonfiction book about Harpo Marx.

Co-sponsored by the Leon Levy Center for Biography.
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THIS EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.