MCC to Host Award-winning Author

Middlesex Community College will host award-winning author Michael Lowenthal as part of the Visiting Writers Series. The event will take place at 11 a.m. on Wednesday, September 30 in the Bedford Campus Café East.

"I love talking with students about writing, because writing is storytelling, and stories are how we make sense of the world: how we come to understand ourselves, and how we learn to empathize with the lives of others," Lowenthal said. "These days – with empathy and understanding seemingly in such short supply – the craft of writing feels all the more urgent."

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Lowenthal has taught creative writing at Boston College, Hampshire College, and for 20 years in the MFA program at Lesley University. With fellowships from Massachusetts Cultural Council and MacDowell Colony, his awards include the James Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelists' Prize.

An author of four novels, "Charity Girl" (Houghton Mifflin, 2007) was a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice and a Washington Post Top Fiction of 2007 pick. Lowenthal also wrote "The Paternity Test" (Terrace Books/U. of Wisconsin Press, 2012), a Lambda Literary Award finalist; "Avoidance" (Graywolf Press, 2002), a short story collection; "Sex With Strangers" (U. of Wisconsin Press, 2021), and a new memoir-in-essays "Place Envy: Essays in Search of Orientation" (Mad Creek Books/Ohio State U. Press, 2026).

Widely anthologized in such volumes as Lost Tribe: Jewish Fiction from the Edge and Best New American Voices 2005, his short stories and essays have been published in Ploughshares, Guernica, the Kenyon Review. Lowenthal has also written for the New York Times Magazine, Boston Magazine, Out, and many other publications.

The MCC Visiting Writers Series is co-sponsored by the Creative Writing Program and the Office of Student Engagement.

MCC's Café East is located in the Campus Center Building at 591 Springs Road in Bedford. Parking is available on-campus.

Learn more about MCC's Visiting Writers Series.