Author John D’Agata will read from his work March 17 at 4 p.m. in Room 265 of Park Hall. A question-and-answer session and reception will follow. The event, sponsored by the creative writing program and English department, is free and open to the public.
D’Agata is the author of About a Mountain (Norton, 2010) and Halls of Fame (Graywolf, 2001). He is the editor of anthologies The Lost Origins of the Essay and The Next American Essay. A graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, he holds MFA degrees in both nonfiction and poetry and teaches creative writing at the University of Iowa.
In a 2009 review of About at Mountain, Publishers Weekly states, “In this circuitous, stylish investigation, D’Agata uses the federal government’s highly controversial (and recently rejected) proposal to entomb the U.S.’s nuclear waste located in Yucca Mountain, near Las Vegas, as his way into a spiraling and subtle examination of the modern city, suicide, linguistics, Edvard Munch’s The Scream, ecological and psychic degradation, and the gulf between information and knowledge.”
