Darcey Steinke
Thursday Feb 28
7:00pm
Hallwalls              

Darcey Steinke is the acclaimed author of the New York Times "Notable Memoir" Easter Everywhere (2007) as well as five novels. In 2017 Maggie Nelson wrote a foreword for a new edition of Steinke's 1992 novel Suicide Blonde. With Rick Moody, Steinke edited Joyful Noise: The New Testament Revisited (Little, Brown & Co., 1997). Her books have been translated into ten languages, and her nonfiction has appeared widely. Her web-story Blindspot was a part of the 2000 Whitney Biennial. She has been both a Henry Hoyns and a Stegner Fellow; Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi; and has taught at the Columbia University School of the Arts, Barnard, The American University of Paris, and Princeton. Flash Count Diary is her most recent book.

Read an excerpt of Sister Golden Hair here: https://granta.com/jill/

A Collaborative UB & Buffalo State College Co-Book Launch
Friday April 5-7:00pm Hallwalls
341 Delaware Avenue
Free and open to the Public

Christina Milletti & Kim Chinquee

A Collaborative UB & Buffalo State College Co-Book Launch
Friday April 5-7:00pm Hallwalls

Bios

Kim Chinquee is a regular contributor to Noon, Denver Quarterly, and Conjunctions, and has also published in Ploughshares, The Nation, Storyquarterly, Indiana Review, Fiction, Mississippi Review, and over a hundred other journals and anthologies. she is the author of the collections Oh Baby, Pretty, Pistol, Shot Girls, and Veer and senior editor of New World Writing. She is an Associate Professor of English at Buffalo State College. Wetsuit is her 6th book.

Christina Milletti’s novel Choke Box: a Fem-Noir won the Juniper Prize for Fiction and is forthcoming from University of Massachusetts Press in March 2019. Her first collection of stories, The Religious and Other Fictions, was published by Carnegie Mellon University Press. You can find her recent stories in journals such as The Iowa Review, Harcourt's Best New American Voices, The Master's Review, The Cincinnati Review, and Denver Quarterly (among other places). She’s an Associate Professor of English at the University at Buffalo. Her next books is a new collection of fiction called Now You See Her.

A Collaborative UB & Buffalo State College Co-Book Launch
Friday April 5-7:00pm Hallwalls
341 Delaware Avenue
Free and open to the Public

Mitchell Jackson

Fri Oct 19
7pm
Hallwalls Cinema
341 Delaware Avenue

Free and Open to the Public

Mitchell S. Jackson’s debut novel The Residue Yearswas praised by publications including The New York Times, The Paris Review, and The Times of London.Jackson is the winner of a Whiting Award. His novel also won The Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence and was a finalist for The Center for Fiction Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, the PEN / Hemingway Award for Debut  Fiction, and the Hurston / Wright Legacy Award. Jackson’s honors include fellowships from TED, the Lannan Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the BreadLoaf Conference, NYFA (New York Foundation for the Arts) and The Center for Fiction. His writing has appeared in publications including The New York Times Book Review, The Paris Review, The Guardian, and Tin House. Jackson is a Clinical Associate Professor of writing at New York University.

Shelley Jackson

Tues Nov 13
7pm
Hallwalls Cinema
341 Delaware Avenue

Free and open to the Public

Shelley Jackson was extracted from the bum leg of a water buffalo in 1963 in the Philippines and grew up complaining in Berkeley, California. Bravely overcoming a chronic pain in her phantom limb, she extracted an AB in art from Stanford and an MFA in creative writing from Brown. She has spent most of her life in used bookstores, smearing unidentified substances on the spines, and is duly obsessed with books: paper, glue, and ink. Nonetheless, she is most widely recognized for an electronic text, Patchwork Girl, a hypertext reworking of the Frankenstein myth, and for SKIN, a story published in tattoos on the skin of volunteers. As for ink on paper, she has left her ineradicable stain on Conjunctions, Fence, Grand Street, The Paris Review, and many restaurant napkins. Her first book, The Melancholy of Anatomy, was published by Anchor in April 2002, her second, the novel Half Life, by Harper Collins in 2006. About her new novel–Riddance; or, The Sybil Joines Vocational School for Ghost Speakers & Hearing-Mouth Children–Samantha Hunt writes: “A genius work of art; a lost history; a rollicking, wondrous, Borgesian library; and a haunting so gloriously conceived, reader, you will shudder.” Riddance will be available from Catapult Books in November 2018.

BRIAN EVENSON is the author of a dozen books of fiction, most recently the story collection A Collapse of Horses (Coffee House Press 2016) and the novella The Warren (Tor.com 2016). He has also recently published Windeye (Coffee House Press 2012) and Immobility (Tor 2012), both of which were finalists for a Shirley Jackson Award. His novel Last Days won the American Library Association's award for Best Horror Novel of 2009. His novel The Open Curtain (Coffee House Press) was a finalist for an Edgar Award and an IHG Award. He has translated work by Christian Gailly, Jean Frémon, Claro, Jacques Jouet, Eric Chevillard, Antoine Volodine, Manuela Draeger, and David B. He is the recipient of three O. Henry Prizes as well as an NEA fellowship. His work has been translated into Czech, French, Italian, Greek, Spanish, Japanese, Persian, and Slovenian. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches in the Critical Studies Program at CalArts.

SAMANTHA HUNT is the author of The Dark Dark: Stories, and three novels. Mr. Splitfoot is a ghost story. The Invention of Everything Else is about the life of inventor Nikola Tesla. The Seas, Hunt’s first novel, will be republished by Tin House Books in 2018. Hunt is the recipient of a 2017 Guggenheim Fellowship, the Bard Fiction Prize, the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Prize and she was a finalist for the Orange Prize. Hunt has been published by the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Guardian and a number of other fine publications. She teaches at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and lives in upstate New York. 

Lance Olsen

Wednesday October 11

5:00pm Salon

7:00 pm Reading Hallwalls (341 Delaware Avenue)

Exhibit X Shuttle will pick up students at Flint Loop (by Capen) at 4:45pm and 6:00pm. And return students from Hallways at 8:00pm.

BIO

Lance Olsen is the author of thirteen novels, one hypertext, six nonfiction works, five short-story collections, a poetry chapbook, and two anti-textbooks about innovative writing, as well as editor of two collections of essays about innovative contemporary fiction. His short stories, essays, poems, and reviews have appeared in hundreds of journals, magazines, and anthologies, including Conjunctions, Black Warrior Review, Fiction International, Iowa Review, Hotel Amerika, Village Voice, Time Out New York, BOMB, Gulf Coast, McSweeney's, and Best American Non-Required Reading. Olsen is a Guggenheim and an N.E.A. fellowship recipient; winner of the Berlin Prize, Berlin Artist-in-Residence grant, and a Pushcart; and former governor-appointed Idaho Writer-in-Residence.  Olsen currently teaches experimental narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah and serves as Chair of the Board of Directors at FC2, one of America's best-known ongoing literary experiments and progressive art communities. With his wife, assemblage-artist and filmmaker Andi Olsen, he divides his time between Salt Lake City and the mountains of central Idaho.

Edie Meidav

Monday November 6

5:00pm Salon

7:00 pm Reading Hallwalls (341 Delaware Avenue)Exhibit X Shuttle will pick up students at Flint Loop (by Capen) at 4:45pm and 6:00pm. And return students from Hallwalls at 8:00pm.

BIO

Called "an American original," Edie Meidav is the author of four books, most recently the novel Lola, California, set in northern California, and the collection Kingdom of the Young. Her work has received honors such as a Lannan, Howard, Bard Fiction Prize, Kafka Award, Fulbrights in Sri Lanka and Cyprus, and a Northern California Book Award nomination, and has been called an editors' pick by the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and elsewhere. A former director of the late New College MFA in San Francisco, and a senior editor at the journal Conjunctions, she is on the faculty of the UMass Amherst MFA program.

BIO

KELLY LINK is the author of the collections Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners, Pretty Monsters, and Get in Trouble. Her short stories have been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Best American Short Stories, and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. She has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. She and Gavin J. Grant have co-edited a number of anthologies, including multiple volumes of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror and, for young adults, Steampunk! and Monstrous Affections. She is the co-founder of Small Beer Press and co-edits the occasional zine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. Get in Trouble was a 2016 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Fiction.

Kirkus Review writes about Get in Trouble:
“In stories as haunting as anything the Grimm brothers could have come up with, Link gooses the mundane with meaning and enchantment borrowed from myth, urban legend and genre fiction. Here are superheroes who, like minor characters from reality shows, attend conferences at the same hotels as dentists and hold auditions for sidekicks. Here, a Ouija board can tell you as much about your future as your guidance counselor. In “Two Houses,” six astronauts wake from suspended animation to while away the time telling ghost stories, although they may be ghosts themselves. . . . In a Link story, someone is always trying to escape and someone is always vanishing without a trace. Lovers are forever being stolen away like changelings, and when someone tells you he’ll never leave you, you should be very afraid. Exquisite, cruelly wise and the opposite of reassuring, these stories linger like dreams and will leave readers looking over their shoulders for their own ghosts.”

Read her story “The Summer People” here:

http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2015/02/04/read-a-story-from-kelly-links-get-in-trouble/

CAN XUE

Date: October 10, 2016

Salon: 4:15-5:15 (436 Clemens)

Reading: 5:30 p.m. – 6:30 p.m CFA Screening Room

Can Xue—whose pseudonym in Chinese means both the dirty snow that refuses to melt and the purest snow at the top of a high mountain—was born in 1953 in Changsha City, Hunan Province, in South China. She lived in Changsha until 2001, when she and her husband moved to Beijing. In 1957, her father, an editorial director at the New Hunan Daily News, was condemned as an Ultra-Rightist and was sent to reform through labor, and her mother, who worked at the same newspaper, was sent to the countryside for labor as well. Because of the family catastrophe during the Cultural Revolution, Can Xue lost her chance for further education and only graduated from elementary school. Largely self-taught, Can Xue has studied reading and writing in English for years, and she has read extensively English texts of literature.

Regarded as one of the most experimental writers in the world by some literary scholars and readers—Susan Sontag once reflected, “If China has one possibility of a Nobel laureate it is Can Xue”—Can Xue describes her works as “soul literature” or “life literature.” She is the author of numerous short-story collections and four novels. Six of her works have been published in English, including Dialogues in Paradise (Northwestern University Press, 1989), Old Floating Cloud: Two Novelllas (Northwestern University Press, 1991), The Embroidered Shoes (Henry Holt, 1997), Blue Light in the Sky and Other Stories (New Directions, 2006), Five Spice Street (Yale University Press, 2009). Vertical Motion (2011) and most recently, Frontier (2016) have been translated into English by University at Rochester’s Open Letter Press. A novel and a commentary book on Kafka are forthcoming from Yale University Press. She has also published books of commentary on Borges, Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe, Italo Calvino, and Bruno Schulz. She claims that all of her works are from the experiments in which she takes herself as the subject.

An extensive website devoted to Can Xue’s work can be found at the MIT website: http://web.mit.edu/ccw/can-xue/index.shtml

AMELIA GRAY

Where:
WNYBAC
468 Washington St
Buffalo, NY 14203
Date: November 3, 2016
Time: 7:00 – 8:00 p.m.

AMELIA GRAY is the author of four books: AM/PM, Museum of the Weird, THREATS, and Gutshot. Her fiction and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Tin House, and VICE. She is winner of the NYPL Young Lion, of FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize, and a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. She lives in Los Angeles.

Gary Lutz reflects: “Call them what you must–stories, fables, parables, nanonovels of melancholized hilarity–but Amelia Gray’s super-concentrated, hyper-velocitous prose marvelments do what so few fictions even attempt: leave you gasping from one unsettling moment to the next.”

SHELLEY JACKSON was extracted from the bum leg of a water buffalo in 1963 in the Philippines and grew up complaining in Berkeley, California. She has spent most of her life in used bookstores, smearing unidentified substances on their spines, and is duly obsessed with books: paper, glue, and ink. After first reading at Hallwalls' old "Black 'n' Blue Theatre" at Tri-Main Center in the inaugural season of Exhibit X on April 8, 2004, she published Half Life, a 440-page novel about conjoined twins, chosen as one of the Village Voice's favorite books of 2006. Jackson is also the author of the story collection The Melancholy of Anatomy (Anchor, 2002); the acclaimed hypertexts Patchwork Girl (a reworking of the Frankenstein myth), The Doll Games, and My Body; and several illustrated children's books, including The Old Woman & the Wave and Sophia, the Alchemist's Dog. Her stories and essays for grown-ups have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including Grand Street, Conjunctions, and Paris Review, and she is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and a Howard Foundation grant. She lives in Brooklyn and teaches at Pratt Institute and the New School. She continues her ongoing project of tattooing a story entitled Skin on volunteers, one word at a time, and more recently has initiated an Instagram based environmental fiction called Snow at: https://instagram.com/snowshelleyjackson/. Her latest piece, "Texts to be Written on the Moon" is part of a current exhibit at the Guggenheim Foundation, available at: http://exhibitions.guggenheim.org/storylines. Jackson is currently serving as UB's 2015-2016 WBFO Visiting Professor.

Read the UB Reporter story.

Karen Tei Yamashita is the author of six books, including I Hotel, finalist for the National Book Award, and most recently, Anime Wong:  Fictions of Performance, all published by Coffee House Press.  She received a US Artists Ford Foundation Fellowship, is Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and currently the co-holder with Bettina Aptheker of the UC Presidential Chair for Feminist Critical Race and Ethnic Studies.

Jeff VanderMeer is an award-winning novelist and editor. His New York Times-bestselling Southern Reach Trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance) made Entertainment Weekly’s top ten best fiction books of 2014, among many other best-of lists. Annihilation was a finalist for the Goodreads Reader Choice Awards, longlisted for the Folio Prize, and one of 16 books from 2014 chosen for the Morning News Tournament of Books. The novels, which chronicle 30 years of attempts to e xplore and understand a mysterious pristine wilderness known as Area X, have been optioned by Scott Rudin and Paramount Pictures, with Alex Garland attached to write and direct. The trilogy has also been translated into 20 languages. VanderMeer writes nonfiction for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic’s website, and The Guardian, among others. With his wife, the award-winning editor Ann VanderMeer, he has edited several iconic and award-winning anthologies, including The Weird, The New Weird, Steampunk, Leviathan 1—3, and The Time Traveler’s Almanac. He is also the author of several coffee table books from Abrams Image and serves as co-director of the Shared Worlds teen writing camp, now in its eighth year. He grew up in the Fiji Islands and currently lives in Tallahassee.

REBECCA GOODMAN is the author of The Surface of Motion (Green Integer), Aftersight (Spuyten Duyvil, forthcoming), and co-author of the composition textbook The Assignment: Why am I Writing This Essay (Fountainhead Press). She is the co-founder and co-director of Ischia Arts: The Program in Creative Writing. She lives in Southern California, where she teaches creative writing at Chapman University.

MARTIN NAKELL is a fictionalist and a poet who believes that the experience of art is energy. That energy can be released – in literature – by the disruption of form – creating fissures along which that energy travels and is where the reader encounters it. He is the author of about 11 books – poetry and fiction--and has won several national awards and grants. He lives in Southern California where he teaches at Chapman University. Of his 2010 novel, Settlement, Angela Genusa writes in Mad Hatters Review: “Nakell pulls off experimental literary techniques like a master prose magician, leaving the reader (after not only first, but repeated readings) to sit and marvel, ‘How did he do that?’”

Greek novelist and short story writer, Amanda Michalopoulou, reads newly translated fiction for the Exhibit X Fiction Series

April 10, 2014, 7:00pm, Hallwalls Cinema

Free and Open to the Public

Parking On Site

Amanda Michalopoulou is the author of six novels, three short story collections, and a successful series of children’s books. One of Greece’s leading contemporary writers, Michalopoulou has won the country’s highest literary awards, including the Revmata Prize, the Diavazo Award, and the Prize of Athens Academy, and has been nominated to and won several US based awards as well.

Michalopoulou’s first book to be translated into English—a collection of stories called I’d Like—was nominated for the Best Translated Book Award (a BTBA) and won the International Literature Prize from the National Endowment for the Arts. It has been described by George Fragopoulos as a “metafictional work reminiscent of Calvino and Borges.”

Now, award winning Rochester based publisher, Open Letter Press, has worked with translator Karen Emmerich once again to make Michalopoulou’s evocatively titled novel—Why I Killed My Best Friend—available to an English speaking audience. Set against the turbulent landscape of Greek political and economic unrest, Michalopoulou’s first translated novel explores the friendship of two cosmopolitan girls—one from Athens by way of Africa, the other from Paris—and how their love and competitiveness “translates” into a difficult relationship: what the narrator calls ‘odiodsamato.” Loosely translated, “odiodsamato” means “frienemies.”

A significant element of the novel explores our increasing global identities. Michalopoulou borrows Debord’s notion of “psychogeography” and investigates how our sense of space, our sense of self, is constantly reinvented in the contemporary moment. For her, it is tangibly expressed in her writing life: many of her novels have been written at residencies in Germany, France, the USA and Switzerland. As she reflects: "Like an actress, foreign countries give me the freedom to invent other identities – and yet I cannot escape my Greek identity. This combination is an ideal breeding ground for the imagination."

In all of Michalopoulou’s work, we are presented with a constellation of unusual stories, characterized as much by lyrical and hypnotic prose as by their movement between languages, peoples, and places. Marked by unerring cosmopolitanism, it’s no surprise that Michalopoulou has been described as “one of Greece's most innovative young story tellers.”

Victor LaValle is the author of Slapboxing with Jesus, a book of stories, and three novels, The Ecstatic, Big Machine, and The Devil in Silver. He has been the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowhsip, the Shirley Jackson Award and the key to Southeast Queens. His writing has appeared in Granta, the Paris Review, New York Magazine, the Washington Post, and Bookforum, among others. He teaches creative writing at Columbia University.