MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM

Michael Cunningham visited the Kelly Writers House on February 11th and 12th. On the evening of February 11, 2002, he read passages from The Hours and answered questions. The recording of that event is linked here. On the morning of February 12, Cunningham returned to the Writers House and participated in an interview/conversation led by Al Filreis. The recording of that discussion is linked here. An introduction to Cunningham was given by Dan Fishback, a student in the Writers House Fellows seminar.

 
Michael Cunningham was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1952 and grew up in Pasedena, California. He received his B.A. in English literature from
Stanford University and his M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. His novel At Home at the End of the World was published by Farrar, Straus &
Giroux in 1990 to wide acclaim. Flesh and Blood, another novel,
followed in 1995. His work appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Redbook,
Esquire, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Vogue, and Metropolitan home. His story "White Angel" was chosen for Best American Short
Stories 1989.

"Michael Cunningham's novel The Hours is that rare combination: a smashing literary tour de force and an utterly invigorating reading experience. If this book does not make you jump up from the sofa, looking at life and literature in new ways, check to see if you have a pulse."

--USA Today

Michael Cunningham received the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the
PEN/Faulkner Award, both for The Hours, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in
1993, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1988, and a Michener Fellowship from the University of Iowa in 1982. He currently lives in New York City. A film version of The Hours is in production, directed by
Stephen Daldry. It will feature Julianne Moore, Nicole Kidman and Meryl
Streep.

Work from the Writers House Fellows Seminar:

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JOHN ASHBERY

John Ashbery visited the Kelly Writers House on March 25-26, 2002. On the evening of March 25, he read from your name here (2000) and As Umbrellas Follow Rain (2001). The recording of that event is linked here. On the morning of March 26, Ashbery returned to the Writers House and participated in an interview/conversation led by Al Filreis. The recording of that discussion will be linked here.

 

"When one goes at ideas directly, with hammer and tongs as it were, ideas tend to elude one in a poem. I think they only come back in when one pretends not to be paying any attention to them, like a cat that will rub against your leg."
-John Ashbery

Born in Rochester, New York, in 1927, John Ashbery is the author of over twenty books of poetry. In 1984, his book A Wave won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. For Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror 1975), he received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award. Some Trees (1956) was selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Series.
He has received a long-list of other rewards, including the Wallace Stevens Award, the Bollingen Prize, the English Speaking Union Prize, the Feltrinelli Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, two Ingram Merrill Foundation grants, the MLA Common Wealth Award in Literature, the Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize, the Frank O'Hara Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, and fellowships from The Academy of American Poets, the Fulbright Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation. He is also a former Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets.

"There is a meditative Ashbery, a formalist Ashbery, a comic Ashbery, a late-Romantic Ashbery, a Language poet Ashbery, and so on-even, as Charles Altieri shows us here, a love poet. No poet since Whitman has tapped into so many distinctly American voices and, at the same time, so preserved his utterance against the jangle of influences. Of course, as in an intricate Venn diagram, these Ashberys overlap; form inspires comedy and meditation (as in "Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape")."

-Susan M. Schultz, from the introduction to
The Tribe of John Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry

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CHARLES FULLER

Charles Fuller visited the Kelly Writers House on April 15th and 16th. On the evening of April 15th, he gave a reading from the draft of his new play, Cuba. This was recorded digitally and is available here. On the morning of April 16, Fuller returned to the Writers House for a conversation moderated by Lorene Cary and Al Filreis--which was webcast live. A recording of that webcast is available here.

 

Playwright Charles Fuller co-founded the Afro-American Arts theater in his hometown, Philadelphia, in 1967. Fuller first received critical acclaim in 1969 for his play, The Perfect Party. He won an Obie award for The Zooman and the Sign in 1980 and in 1982 he won the Pulitzer Prize for drama for his A Soldier's Play. The play was adapted into a film, A Soldier's Story, in 1984.

Critical acclaim for Fuller's A Soldier's Play:

"Mr. Fuller demands that his black characters find the courage to break their suicidal, fratricidal cycle-- just as he demands that whites end the injustices that have locked his black characters into a nightmare."

-Frank Rich, The New York Times

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"My argument is on the stage. I don't have to be angry, O.K.? I get it all out right up there. There's no reason to carry this down from the stage and into the seats. And it does not mean that I am not enraged at injustice or prejudice or bigotry. It simply means that I cannot be enraged all the time. To spend one's life being angry, and in the process doing nothing to change it, is to me ridiculous. I could be mad all day long, but if I'm not doing a damn thing, what difference does it make?"
-Charles Fuller, Interview 1982

Read about Charles Fuller's previous trip to the Writers House

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