Richard Kenney was born in Glens Falls, New York in 1948. In 1970 he won a Reynolds Fellowship to study Celtic lore in Ireland, Scotland and Wales. His works have been published in many magazines and journals, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly and The American Scholar. He has been a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellow, a John and Catherine MacArthur Foundation fellow and a Bogliasco Foundation fellow. In 1994, he was awarded the Lannan Literary Award. He currently teaches in the English department at the University of Washington and lives with his family in Port Townsend, Washington.   He is the author of four books of poetry: The Evolution of the Flightless Bird (which was awarded the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize), Orrery, The Invention of the Zero, and The One-Strand River. For more information about Richard Kenny, click here.

26 May, Wednesday, 8:00 p.m., Reading by Eliza Griswold, Aula Magna, John Cabot University, Guarini Campus, Via della Lungara 233.

Eliza Griswold’s poems and reportage have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, among many others. She is a fellow at the New America Foundation and at the American Academy in Rome. Her first book of poems, Wideawake Field (FSG), was published in 2007. Her first non-fiction book, The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the fault line between Christianity and Islam will be published by FSG in the fall of 2010. For more information about Eliza Griswold, click here.

31 May, 8:00 p.m., Reading by Siddharth Shanghvi, Aula Magna, John Cabot University, Guarini Campus, Via della Lungara 233.

Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi’s debut novel, The Last Song of Dusk, won the Betty Trask Award in the UK, the Premio Grinzane Cavour in Italy, and was nominated for the IMPAC Prize in Ireland. Translated into 12 languages, The Last Song of Dusk was an international bestseller. Shanghvi has been voted: India Today’s 50 Most Powerful Young Indians; Times of India’s 10 Global Indians; Hindustan Times: 10 Most Creative Men; Sunday Times UK: The Next Big Thing; New Statesmen UK: India’s Ten Bright Lights; Elle Magazine’s 50 Most Stylish People; La Stampa, Italy: World’s 10 Best Dressed Men. Shanghvi’s new novel, The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay, nominated for the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize, has just been published in Italy, and will be published in America in September this year.

1 June, Tuesday, 8:00 p.m., Craft Workshop by Mark Strand, Aula Magna, John Cabot University, Guarini Campus, Via della Lungara 233.

Mark Strand is a Pulitzer Prize Winner, Former U.S. Poet Laureate, and Recipient of the Gold Medal in Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters For more information about Mark Strand, click here.

2 June, Wednesday, 8:00 p.m., Reading by Mark Strand, Aula Magna, John Cabot University, Guarini Campus, Via della Lungara 233. Reception to follow reading.

7 June, Monday, 8:00 p.m., Reading by Joseph Harrison, Aula Magna, John Cabot University, Guarini Campus, Via della Lungara 233.

Joseph Harrison was born in Richmond, Virginia, grew up in Virginia and Alabama, and studied at Yale and Johns Hopkins. His book Someone Else’s Name (Waywiser, 2003) was named as one of five poetry books of the year by the Washington Post. His second book of poems, Identity Theft, was published by Waywiser in 2008. His poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry 1998, 180 More Extraordinary Poems for Every Day, The Library of America’s Anthology of American Religious Poems, the Penguin Pocket Anthology of Poetry, the Penguin Pocket Anthology of Literature, The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets, and many journals. In 2005 he was the recipient of an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2009 he received a Fellowship in Poetry from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He lives in Baltimore.

8 June, Tuesday, 8:00 p.m., Craft Workshop by Simon Mawer, Aula Magna, John Cabot University, Guarini Campus, Via della Lungara 233.

Simon Mawer is the author of The Glass Room, 2009 Man Booker Prize Short-listed Novel.  For more information about Simon Mawer, click here.

9 June, Wednesday, 8:00 p.m., Reading by Simon Mawer, Aula Magna, John Cabot University, Guarini Campus, Via della Lungara 233. Reception to follow reading.

14 June, Monday, 8:00 p.m., Michael Reynolds/Europa Editions Panel Discussion on the American Book Market and Books in Translation, Aula Magna, John Cabot University, Guarini Campus, Via della Lungara 233.

15 June, Tuesday, 8:00 p.m., Reading by Massimo Gezzi, Aula Magna, John Cabot University, Guarini Campus, Via della Lungara 233.

Massimo Gezzi was born in 1976 in Sant’Elpidio a Mare (FM). In 2002 he received his laurea in Modern Literature from the University of Bologna, with an International Montale Prize-winning dissertation about the poet Bartolo Cattafi. He is a contributing editor for Atelier, Poesia and Nuovi Argomenti. He has published two collections of poetry: Il mare a destra (Edizioni Atelier 2004) and L’attimo dopo (Luca Sossella Editore). He has been an Italian Fellow for the Arts of the American Academy in Rome. After living and working for some years in Pavia and Rome, he’s currently working as an assistant at the Italian Institute of the University of Bern (Switzerland). He lives between his native town and Switzerland. For more information about Massimo Gezzi, click here.

16 June, Wednesday, 8:00 p.m., InVerse Event:  Roundtable with with poets Cristina Annino, Fabio Ciriachi, Marco Giovenale, Lidia Riviello. Lemon Tree Courtyard, John Cabot University, Guarini Campus, Via della Lungara 233. Reception to follow reading.

21 June, Monday, 8:00 p.m., Reading by George Minot, Aula Magna, John Cabot University, Guarini Campus,Via della Lungara 233.

George Minot was born and raised in a large family in Massachusetts, lived in New York most of his adult life, and now lives in Rome. He is the author of a novel, The Blue Bowl (Knopf), and the forthcoming OmGirl. In addition to fiction, he writes non-fiction, works as an environmental communications consultant (writing and editing), and teaches yoga and healing with whole foods. He has a four year-old son, Milo Minot – who is also his uncompromising Italian language teacher.

22 June, Tuesday, 8:00 p.m., Reading by Peter Campion, Aula Magna, John Cabot University, Guarini Campus, Via della Lungara 233.

Peter Campion is the author of two collections of poetry, Other People (2005) and The Lions (2009,) both from the University of Chicago Press. He also published a monograph on the painter Mitchell Johnson in 2004, with Terrence Rogers Fine Art. His poems and prose have appeared recently in AGNI, ArtNews, The Boston Globe, Modern Painters, The New York Times, Poetry, The New Republic, Slate, and The Yale Review. He has received a George Starbuck Lectureship at Boston University, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and Jones Lectureship at Stanford University, a Pushcart Prize, and a Civitella Ranieri Individual Artist’s Fellowship. He is currently the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. He is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Auburn University. He edits the journal Literary Imagination, which is published by Oxford University Press. For more information about Peter Campion, click here.

23 June, Wednesday, 8:00 p.m., Reading by Brad Leithauser and Mary Jo Salter, Aula Magna, John Cabot University, Guarini Campus, Via della Lungara 233.

Mary Jo Salter is the author of five collections of poems that have won such accolades as the New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She is a coeditor of The Norton Anthology of Poetry and a lyricist who has worked with composers Allen Bonde and Fred Hersch. She is also an essayist and reviewer for such publications as The New York Times Book Review and The Yale Review. She has received many awards, including NEA and Guggenheim fellowships. For more information about Mary Jo Salter, click here.

Brad Leithauser was born in Detroit and graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School. He is the author of five novels, a novel in verse, four previous volumes of poetry, a collection of light verse, and a book of essays. Among his many awards and honors are a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Ingram Merrill Grant, and a MacArthur Fellowship.  In 2005, the president of Iceland inducted him into the Order of the Falcon for his writings about Nordic literature. Leithauser and his wife, the poet Mary Jo Salter, are members of the faculty of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. For more information about Brad Leithauser, click here.