Wellesley Spring Writers Series Opens Tuesday

Wellesley College students, faculty, and community members alike will gather in excitement this afternoon to hear the words of two writers during the Newhouse Center for the Humanities’ first installment of the Spring 2015 Distinguished Writers Series.

The reading will take place at 4:30 PM in the Susan and Donald Newhouse Center for the Humanities at Wellesley College, Green Hall, 2nd Floor. The event is free and open to the public.

Joshua Ferris and Helen Oyeyemi are novelists by trade. Ferris, best known for 2007’s Then We Came to the End, is an Illinois native-turned-New Yorker whose work has been published in the Guardian, the New Yorker and the Iowa Review. He was included in the New Yorker’s 2010 “20 under 40” list, and has been nominated for the National Book Award and the 2014 Man Booker Prize. Was honored with the 2014 Dylan Thomas prize for his most recent novel, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour. According to author Adam Morgan, Ferris’s work “combin[es] Woody Allen’s New York nihilism with an Ivy League vocabulary.”

The series’ second reader, Helen Oyeyemi, hails from the United Kingdom, and is the author of five novels. Her work has been described as having “roots in Henry James and Edgar Allan Poe”, and has been recognized both in Britain and internationally with a nomination for the Shirley Jackson award and as a recipient of the Somerset Maugham Award. Washington Post reviewer Ron Charles fawned over Oyeyemi’s work in a 2014 review of her most recent book, Boy, Snow, Bird, declaring the author to be “the cleverest in the land…daring and unnerving.”

Both Ferris’s dark humor and Oyeyemi’s cerebral prose are sure to have patrons of the arts scrambling through historic amounts Massachusetts snow for an afternoon of literature and conversation.

-Post by Katelyn Campbell ’17