WCSU MFA Program to Present Author Readings at Winter Residency

DANBURY, CT — Award-winning novelists, poets and nonfiction authors will read from and discuss their works during the Master of Fine Arts in Creative and Professional Writing winter residency in January at Western Connecticut State University.

A series of programs each evening from Wednesday, Jan. 2, through Monday, Jan. 7, 2019, will feature distinguished writers whose achievements include selection as recipients of the Housatonic Book Award as well as major national honors in the fields of fiction, nonfiction, memoirs and poetry. All readings will begin at 7:30 p.m. in the President’s Reception Room, located in Room 218 of the Classroom Building on the university’s Westside campus, 43 Lake Ave. Extension in Danbury. Admission will be free and the public is invited.

Following is the program schedule:

• Wednesday, Jan. 2: An evening of readings by M.F.A. program alumni also will include a featured faculty reading from writer and educator Oscar De Los Santos, chair of the Department of Writing, Linguistics, and Creative Process. De Los Santos is the author of “Hard Boiled Egg” (Fine Tooth Press, 2004) and “Infinite Wonderlands” (Fine Tooth Press, 2006).

• Thursday, Jan. 3: Victoria Chang is the editor of the anthology Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation (2004). In addition to editing, she writes children’s books and teaches in Antioch University’s M.F.A. program. Chang’s collections of poetry include “Circle” (2005), winner of the Crab Orchard Review Award Series in Poetry; “Salvinia Molesta” (2008); “The Boss” (2013); and “Barbie Chang” (2017). Her poems have been published in the Kenyon Review, Poetry, the Threepenny Review, and Best American Poetry 2005. In 2017, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

• Friday, Jan. 4: Dan Pope is the author of the novels “In the Cherry Tree” (Picador, 2003) and “Housebreaking” (Simon & Schuster, 2015). His short stories have appeared in McSweeney’s, Harvard Review, Crazyhorse, Shenandoah, Greensboro Review, Iowa Review and Best American New Voices 2007. He is a 2002 graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, where he was awarded the Glen Schaeffer Award from the International Institute of Modern Letters and the John Leggett Prize in Fiction. Pope specializes in fiction and creative nonfiction, and will host a conversation with William Giraldi, author of the novels “Busy Monsters” and “Hold the Dark” (now a Netflix film), the memoir “The Hero’s Body,” and a collection of criticism, “American Audacity.” He also is an editor for the journal AGNI at Boston University.

• Saturday, Jan. 5: Dick Lehr is a professor of journalism at Boston University. From 1985 to 2003, he was a reporter at the Boston Globe, where he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in investigative reporting and won numerous regional and national journalism awards. He served as the Globe’s legal affairs reporter, magazine and feature writer, and as a longtime member of the newspaper’s investigative reporting unit, the Spotlight Team. Before that, Lehr, who is also an attorney, was a reporter at The Hartford Courant. Lehr is the author of “The Fence: A Police Cover-up Along Boston’s Racial Divide,” a nonfiction narrative about the worst-known case of police brutality in Boston, which was an Edgar Award finalist for best nonfiction. He is coauthor of the New York Times bestseller and Edgar Award winner “Black Mass: Whitey Bulger, the FBI and a Devil’s Deal,” and its sequel, “Whitey: The Life of America’s Most Notorious Mob Boss.”
• Sunday, Jan. 6: James M. Chesbro’s essays have been listed as notable selections in The Best American Essays 2012, 2014, and The Best American Sports Writing 2014. His work appears or is forthcoming in The Writer’s Chronicle, The Huffington Post, AOL.com, Stymie Magazine, Superstition Review, Connecticut Review, Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality, The Good Men Project, Teaching Tolerance, Fairfield University Magazine, Serendipity, Brevity’s blog, Weston Magazine, and Teachers of Vision. He is co-editor of You: An Anthology of Essays Devoted to the Second Person (Welcome Table Press).

• Monday, Jan. 7: Graduate students in the program will read from their works in progress.

The evening series is presented as part of the winter residency for graduate students currently enrolled in the M.F.A. in Creative and Professional Writing program. Launched in 2005, the M.F.A. program at WCSU enables participants from across the nation to pursue master’s degree studies in a diverse range of creative and professional writing genres through a comprehensive distance learning program complemented by summer and winter on-campus residencies. The coordinator of the WCSU M.F.A. program is Anthony D’Aries, a widely published essayist and author of “The Language of Men: A Memoir,” winner of the PEN/New England Discovery Prize and Foreword magazine’s Memoir of the Year Award.