On March 6 and 7, Gunston hosted Daisy Fried and Roy Kesey as part of the spring installment of In Celebration of Books, the school’s visiting writers series. Fried, a poet and critic, currently serves on the board of the National Book Critics Circle. Kesey is the recipient of an NEA grant for fiction as well as a PEN/Heim grant for translation.
A public reading of their work was held on Monday, March 6 in Gunston’s Field House. After that, Fried and Kesey visited Gunston’s English classrooms over the course of two days as they led students in writing exercises and craft discussions.
Photos: Daisy Fried and Roy Kesey
Poet and critic Daisy Fried is the author of three books of poetry: Women’s Poetry: Poems and Advice (University of Pittsburgh, 2013), named by Library Journal one of the five best poetry books of 2013, My Brother is Getting Arrested Again (University of Pittsburgh, 2006), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and She Didn’t Mean to Do It, (University of Pittsburgh, 2000), which won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Award. For her poetry, she’s received Guggenheim, Hodder and Pew Fellowships, as well as a Pushcart Prize and the Cohen Award from Ploughshares. Recent poems have been published in the London Review of Books, The Nation, The New Republic, Poetry, The Threepenny Review and Best American Poetry 2013. She reviews books of poetry for The New York Times, Poetry and The Threepenny Review, and won the Editors Award from Poetry for “Sing, God-Awful Muse,” an essay about reading Paradise Lost and breastfeeding. She is on the faculty of the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers.
Roy Kesey’s latest books are the short story collection Any Deadly Thing (Dzanc Books 2013) and the novel Pacazo (Dzanc Books 2011/Jonathan Cape 2012). His translation of Pola Oloixarac’s Savage Theories was published by Soho Press in January of this year. His short stories, essays, translations and poems have appeared in over a hundred magazines and anthologies, including Best American Short Stories and New Sudden Fiction. He is currently a visiting professor at Washington College; last semester he taught a course called “Fire and Ice: How the World Ends,” an anthropological and scientific exploration of the apocalypse, and this semester he is teaching a creative writing workshop on travel writing and a literature course on contemporary world fiction.
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