Athens, Ga. – Authors Ed Pavlic, Reginald McKnight, and Binyavanga Wainaina will read from their work on Thursday, March 22 at 7 p.m. in the Griffith Auditorium of the Georgia Museum of Art. The event is free and open to the public.
Ed Pavlic is director of the UGA Creative Writing Program. He will read from his second book of poems, Labors Lost Left Unfinished (2007, Sheep Meadow Press). His book, Paraph of Bone & Other Kinds of Blue, won The American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Award in 2001. His study of African-American modernism, Crossroads Modernism, was published in 2002 (University of Minnesota Press). He was the founding and managing editor of The Madison Times – Madison’s black community weekly newspaper and has taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Indiana University, and Union College.
Reginald McKnight is the Hamilton Holmes Professor at UGA. His most recent book is the novel He Sleeps. He has published three collections of short stories: White Boys, The Kind of Light that Shines on Texas, and Moustapha’s Eclipse. His nonfiction works include African American Wisdom and Wisdom of the African World as well as several essays, articles, and reviews. He has received an NEA fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, an O’Henry Award, the Bernice M. Slote Award, the Drue Heinz Prize, a Special Citation from the PEN/Hemingway Foundation and a Whiting Writer’s Award.
Binyavanga Wainaina is a Kenyan author, journalist and winner of the Caine Prize. Wainaina was born in Nakuru in Rift Valley province. He attended Moi Primary School in Nakuru, Mangu High School in Thika, and Lenana School in Nairobi. He later studied commerce at the University of Transkei in South Africa, after which he worked in Cape Town for some years as a freelance food and travel writer. In July 2002, he won the Caine Prize for African Writing for his short story “Discovering Home.” In 2003, he was given an award by the Kenya Publisher’s Association, in recognition of his services to Kenyan literature. He has written for The EastAfrican, National Geographic, The Sunday Times (South Africa), The New York Times and The Guardian (UK). He is presently a Writer-in-Residence at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., where he is teaching, lecturing and working on a novel.
