By Logan Miller
College of Fine Arts and Communication Media Office
CONWAY — Writer John D’Agata will give a public reading and book signing at the University of Central Arkansas on Feb. 23 when he visits campus as artist in residence.
The event, free and open to the public, will be at 7:30 p.m. in the College of Business auditorium, room 107.
D’Agata is the author of The Lifespan of a Fact, About a Mountain and Halls of Fame and the editor of the anthologies The Next American Essay, The Lost Origins of the Essay, and the forthcoming The Making of the American Essay. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Howard Foundation, and the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies, and is currently working on a translation of a book by the ancient Greek writer Plutarch, as well as a new collection of his own essays.
D’Agata, who teaches courses on the history of the essay, experiments in essaying and a variety of workshops in the college of Liberal Arts & Sciences at the University of Iowa, will give two other presentations at UCA during his visit.
The first will be a masterclass with students from the Creative Nonfiction class on Tuesday, Feb. 3, from 2:40-3:55 p.m. in Thompson Hall room 331. The other, a craft talk and general Q&A with Writing students, will take place on Wednesday, Feb. 24, from 10-10:50 a.m. in Thompson 331.
Both presentations are also open to the public.
“For several reasons, John D’Agata is one of the most influential and innovative voices in American creative nonfiction,” said Dr. John Vanderslice, associate professor of Writing and the faculty sponsor for the residency. “The landscape of nonfiction writing in this country, especially lyrical nonfiction writing, would be only a shadow of its current self without the vision and the output of D’Agata.”
Vanderslice called D’Agata’s creative nonfiction an “ingenious blending of personal history, investigative reporting, collage technique, and pure poetry.”
“His books Halls of Fame and About a Mountain left me stunned,” Vanderslice said. “On top of all that, he directs one of the most important nonfiction writing programs in the country at the University of Iowa, and he’s authored a three-volume series about the American essay that for the current generation of students and teachers has more or less defined the form. There is simply no more important figure in American creative nonfiction than this man. We are lucky to have snared him.”
For more information, contact Dr. Carey Clark, interim chair and associate professor of the Department of Writing, at (501) 450-3345 or cclark@uca.edu.
The Artist in Residence program is funded by UCA’s arts fee and is administered by the College of Fine Arts and Communication. For more information about the program, call the Office of the Dean, College of Fine Arts and Communication, at (501) 450-3293 or e-mail jdmiller@uca.edu.
The UCA College of Fine Arts and Communication includes the Departments of Art, and Communication, Mass Communication and Theatre, Music, and Writing. The college’s primary mission is the preparation of the next generation of artists, educators, and communicators. For more information about CFAC, visit www.uca.edu/cfac or call (501) 450-3293.
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