Martha Mihalick '01 is an editor at Greenwillow Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. In more than a decade there, she has worked with many of the most acclaimed authors and artists in children's books. She acquires and edits books for children and teens of all ages, from picture books to young adult novels. Her books include the William C. Morris Award and Andre Norton Award finalist The Girl of Fire and Thorns by Rae Carson, as well as its sequel The Crown of Embers; Breathe by Sarah Crossan; Entwined by Heather Dixon; Masque of the Red Death by Bethany Griffin; and the Last Apprentice series, among others. She was also the founding chair of the Children's Book Council's Early Career Committee shortly after entering the publishing industry. She speaks regularly across the country at conferences for the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators. You can find her on twitter as @marthamihalick and her website is marthamihalick.com.
Martha graduated magna cum laude as an English major in 2001. She was head consultant at the Writing Center by her senior year, editor of The Bonfire student literary magazine, co-president of the Mermaid Players, and an active member of the Belles Lettres Literary Society. She also received a certificate from the University of Denver Publishing Institute in 2001. She now lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Professor Wendy Moffat’s A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster was selected as runner-up for the PEN/ Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award 2011 for Biography for “a work of exceptional literary, narrative and artistic merit, based on scrupulous research.” The world’s oldest international literary and human rights organization, PEN will celebrate the work of finalists at a reception in New York City in October. Earlier this summer, Moffat’s book was also chosen as one of four finalists for Scotland’s prestigious James Tait Black Prize in Biography. The James Tait Black, established in 1919, is Britain’s oldest literary award; Forster himself won the Tait Black fiction prize in 1924, for A Passage to India.
]]>Mary Cappello ’82, award-winning author; Metzger-Conway Fellow
Autobiography of Illness/Biography of Cure
An illustrated reading that brings together writing about self in the form of "rituals in transfigured time" and writing about the other in the form of lyric biography. Cappello will discuss her entry into cancer treatment as a patient-writer and her new book on Chevalier Jackson, a Pennsylvania physician-artist, a pioneering laryngologist, and a foreign body specialist. For more information go to The Clarke Forum web site.
Readings by Ellen McLaughlin
Ellen McLaughlin, playwright and actress
McLaughlin will read excerpts from several of her plays, including Infinity’s House, Iphigenia and Other Daughters, Tongue of a Bird, Helen, The Persians, Oedipus and Ajax in Iraq. She is most well known for having originated and developed the part of the Angel in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, having appeared in every U.S. production from its earliest workshops through its Broadway run.
A presentation by Professor Harriet Pollack, Bucknell University
The Mississippi writer Eudora Welty is most well-known for her prize winning stories and novels. But as a Junior Publicity Agent for the WPA during the depression, she also took a number of stunning photographs. This talk considers Welty's photographic representations of the African-American woman's body in the context of the history of that body in photography generally. The comparison suggests how Welty's images are of her time and yet also innovative, presenting us with some new ways to see.
Harriet Pollack, Professor (Ph.D. University of Virginia), is currently writing about and teaching courses that consider the body in Southern Literature and photography in the contexts of Southern history and cultural trauma. She recently co-edited, with Christopher Metress, Emmett Till in Literary Memory and Imagination, a book about the racial murder that began the civil rights movement.
Professor Moffat recently was awarded the Best First Biography Prize for E.M. Forster: A New Life (Bloomsbury) by the Biographers' Club in London. Her book also was one of top ten gay and lesbian books picked by Amazon editors in 2010.