Sunday, March 8, 2009

Visiting Writers Series Welcomes Askold Melnyczuk


Chester College of New England's Visiting Writers Series will welcome Askold Melnyczuk to campus for a reading at 6 p.m., Thursday, April 2 in Powers 29. Admission is free for students with ID and a $5 donation for all others.

Melnyczuk is a poet and a novelist, and his work has appeared in The New York Times, The Gettysburg Review, The Los Anegles Times, Ploughshares, The Antioch Review, and The Nation. His second novel, Ambassador of the Dead, was one of The Los Angeles Times Best Books of 2002, and his first novel, What is Told, was a New York Times Notable Book. His third novel, The House of Widows, was published in 2007.

In 1997, Melnyczuk received a Lila Wallace-Readers' Digest Award in Fiction. Winner of the McGinnis Award in Fiction, he has also been awarded grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. He is founding editor of AGNI and served as editor until 2002. He continues to contribute a series of essays called "Shadowboxing." He is professor of creative writing at The University of Massachusetts-Boston and a member of the core fiction faculty of the graduate Bennington Writing Seminars.


A research associate of the Ukrainian Institute at Harvard, Melnyczuk has served on the boards of the New England Poetry Club and PEN–New England and has been a fellow of the Boston Foundation. In 2001 he received PEN American Center's biennial Nora Magid Award for Magazine Editing as well as PEN-New England's "Friend to Writers" Award.

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