Local Programs

An ArtZine exclusive! Listen to nationally and internationally known writers read and discuss their work during their visits to the Thurber House.

CELIA RIVENBARK

Celia Rivenbark is an award-winning newspaper columnist and freelance journalist. She has won national and state press awards and is the author of four humor collections including the Thurber Humor Prize semi-finalist,We’re Just Like You, Only Prettier, and Stop Dressing Your Six-Year-Old Like a Skank. She will read from her latest, Belle Weather: Mostly Sunny With a Chance of Scattered Hissy Fits. In this newest collection of laugh-out-loud essays, you’ll experience: The Joys of Remodeling Tara, Why French Women Suck at Competitive Eating, Britney’s To-Do List, and many, many more. She lives in North Carolina.

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HEATHER BYER

Heather Byer is a freelance writer and editor in New York City, as well as a copyeditor at a management consulting firm. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and other publications. Sweet: An Eight-Ball Odyssey is her first book, which recounts her first fumbling attempts to learn a game that beckoned to her for years. She describes the hypnotic pull that surrounds the sport of pool: the netherworld of pool halls; the troubled players who lose themselves in the game; and the constant quest for the win. Byer was born and raised in Columbus, Ohio before moving to New York City in 1999. This reading is from the Thurber House from July 23rd, 2008.

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SENA JETER NASLUND

Sena Jeter Naslund is Writer in Residence at the University of Louisville, program director of the Spalding University brief-residency MFA in Writing, and current Kentucky Poet Laureate. Recipient of the Harper Lee Award and the Southeastern Library Association Fiction Award, she is editor of The Louisville Review and the Fleur-de-Lis Press. She is the author of the novels Ahab's Wife, Four Spirits, and Sherlock in Love and a collection of stories, The Disobedience of Water. She lives in Louisville, Kentucky. Clip #1: she talks about Four Spirits, with Brent Davis from WOSU at the Thurber House. Clip #2: she reads from this same book.

Interview

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Reading

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ANN-MARIE MACDONALD

Ann-Marie MacDonald is a Toronto-based writer and actor. Her play Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) won the Governor General's Award for Drama, the Chalmers Award for Outstanding Play and the Canadian Authors' Association Award for Drama. She won a Gemini Award for her role in the film Where the Spirit Lives and was nominated for a Genie for her role in I've Heard the Mermaids Singing. Fall On Your Knees was published in the New Face of Fiction program in 1996. Clip #1: She talks about The Way the Crow Flies at the Thurber House. Clip #2: she reads from this same book.

Interview

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Reading

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LEE MARTIN

Lee Martin is a professor and Director of Creative Writing at The Ohio State University. He is the author of several books including the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist, The Bright Forever. He will read from his latest novel, River of Heaven, a striking story about the high cost of living a lie, the chains that bind us to our past, and the obligations we have to those we love. He has won a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, a Lawrence Foundation Award, and the Glenna Luschei Prize.

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ALAN LIGHTMAN

Alan Lightman is a distinguished physicist and an accomplished novelist. He was the first professor at MIT to receive a joint appointment in the sciences and the humanities. His novel Einstein's Dreams was an international bestseller and has been translated into thirty languages. It was runner-up for the 1994 PEN New England/Boston Globe Winship Award. Einstein's Dreams was also the March 1998 selection for National Public Radio's "Talk of the Nation" Book Club.

Lightman talks about his career and his novel Reunion in this interview recorded in Summer, 2005 with WOSU’s Brent Davis at The Thurber House.

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Katrina Kittle

Dayton, Ohio native Katrina Kittle reads from her latest novel, The Kindness of Strangers, which creates a haunting vision of the secret lives of people we think we know. It is a powerful and poignant tale of how the tragedy of a single family in a small suburban town can affect so many. She is also the author of Traveling Light and Two Truths and a Lie. The Kindness of Strangers was the Fiction Book winner for the 2006 Great Lakes Book Awards. Katrina teaches 6th and 7th grade English at Miami Valley School in Dayton, and also acts frequently in productions for the Dayton Theatre Guild.

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Brock Clarke

Brock Clarke read from his latest novel, An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England, the delightfully dark story of “accidental arsonist and murderer” Sam Pulsifier, who leads readers through a flame-filled adventure starting when he accidentally burned down the historic home of Emily Dickinson. Clarke is the author of The Ordinary White Boy, What We Won’t Do, and Carrying the Torch. He has twice been a finalist for a National Magazine Award in Fiction. His work has appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Georgia Review, Pushcart Prize, and on NPR’s Selected Shorts, among others. He teaches creative writing at the University of Cincinnati.

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