Athens, Ga. – Author Josh Weil will read from his work on Feb. 28 at 7:30 p.m. at Ciné BarCaféCinema, 235 West Hancock Ave. in Athens. The event, sponsored by the University of Georgia creative writing program’s VOX Reading Series, is free and open to the public.
Weil is the author of The New Valley (Grove, 2009), a New York Times Editors’ Choice that won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from The American Academy of Arts and Letters; a “5 Under 35” Award from the National Book Foundation; the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award; and was shortlisted for the Virginia Literary Award in Fiction.
Weil’s short fiction has appeared in Granta, One Story, Agni, Glimmer Train, and American Short Fiction; he has written non-fiction for the New York Times, Granta Online, Oxford American and Poets & Writers.
Since earning his MFA from Columbia University, he has received the Dana Award in Portfolio and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences, the Writer’s Center, and the Fulbright Foundation. Formerly the Tickner Writer-in-Residence at Gilman School, he is currently the Distinguished Visiting Writer at Bowling Green State University. In the fall of 2011, he will join the faculty at the University of Mississippi as the John and Renee Grisham Emerging Southern Writer.
According to Anthony Doerr of the New York Times Sunday Book Review, “Weil meticulously imagines people and their histories, and presents them as a product of their places. This is perhaps the hardest thing for a fiction writer of any age, working in any form, to accomplish.”
Tim O’Brien, winner of a National Book Award and author of The Things They Carried and July, July writes: “I was captivated and moved by each of these finely made novellas. The quiet, mostly ordinary lives of the characters who populate The New Valley shine with a strange and intense luminosity that is at times heartbreaking, at other times triumphant. There is a magic and gentle beauty in this book that makes me remember why I had always wanted to be a writer.”
For more information on Weil, see https://pod51004.outlook.com/owa/redir.aspx?C=6299fa4c15174840800624145ec3f5fb&URL=http%3a%2f%2fwww.joshweil.com%2f.
For more information on the creative writing program, see http://www.english.uga.edu/newsite/cwp/home.html.
