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Award-winning poet and novelist Laura Kasischke will make a campus appearance, presented by Poetry Days, at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, November 5 in Gasson Hall room 100.
Her books of poetry include Wild Brides, Fire and Flower, Dance and Disappear, Gardening in the Dark, Lilies Without, and Space, in Chains, which won the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award.
Prior to her public event--which will include a reading, Q&A with the audience, and book signing, and is sponsored by the Lowell Humanities Series--Kasischke will meet with interested students and faculty at an informal colloquium in Stokes Hall room N203, from 4:30-5:30 p.m., to discuss her work and the craft of writing.
"I'm very excited to have Laura Kasischke among us,” said Professor of English and Department Chair Suzanne Matson, an acclaimed author of both novels and poetry collections.
“A prolific and highly praised poet and fiction writer both, her work uses the material of the everyday, though it's an ordinariness made luminous and mysterious by the layers of memory and history she mines there," she added.
Kasischke has won numerous awards for her poetry, including the Juniper Prize, the Beatrice Hawley Award, the Alice Fay DiCastagnola Award, the Bobst Award for Emerging Writers, and the Rilke Poetry Prize from the University of North Texas. She has also won several Pushcart Prizes and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.
Her narrative expertise helps account for her dual career as a novelist. Her novels include Suspicious River, White Bird in a Blizzard, The Life Before her Eyes (which was made into a 2007 movie starring actress Uma Thurman), In a Perfect World, and The Raising.
On such subjects as global pandemics and school shootings, Kasischke’s novels have enjoyed popular appeal. The New York Times noted the poetic qualities of her fiction: “It is not enough to say that Kasischke's language is ‘poetic,’ a word that has come to mean ‘pretty.’ Rather, her writing does what good poetry does—it shows us an alternate world and lulls us into living in it.”
A native of Grand Rapids, Michigan, Kasischke teaches in the University of Michigan’s MFA program.
For information visit the Lowell Humanities Series web site: www.bc.edu/lowellhs. The series is sponsored by the Lowell Institute, BC's Institute for the Liberal Arts and the Provost's Office.