Four writers from The Ohio State University Creative Writing Program invite readers to join in a discussion of the writing of Russell Banks, Bexley Commmunity Book Club’s 2014 Selected Author at Bexley Public Library on Tuesday, Jan. 28 at 7:00 p.m. The event is the third in a series of free events preceding the celebrated author’s visit to Bexley in April. (More information on other events can be found at www.bexleyeducationfoundation.org.) To view the event flyer, please visit The Bexley Education Foundation.
The January 28 panel at Bexley Public Library, organized and moderated by author and OSU professor Lee Martin, will address, specifically, three Banks works: The Sweet Hereafter, Trailer Park, and Lost Memory of Skin. Admission will be free, and books will be available for purchase from BCBC Community Partner The Book Loft of German Village.
Panelist biographies:
Brett Beach will graduate with an MFA from Ohio State University in the spring. Winner of the 2013 Helen Earnhart Harley Award in Fiction, his stories can be found in Hobart, The Normal School, and elsewhere.
Jamie Lyn Smith worked for ten years as a screenwriter, playwright, and production manager in theater and film in New York and Los Angeles, and then as a high school teacher in New York City before returning to her native Ohio, where she is currently a second-year student in OSU’s MFA Program. She is working on a series of short stories about life in Appalachian Ohio.
J. Preston Wittis a third-year MFA candidate at The Ohio State University. He serves as a fiction editor for OSU's literary magazine The Journal and is the founding editor of PhoneFiction (www.phone-fiction.com), a tech-savvy publishing experiment that aims to make short literature more accessible to students.
Lee Martin is the author of the novelsThe Bright Forever, a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction; Break the Skin, River of Heaven; and Quakertown. He has also published three memoirs, From Our House, Turning Bones, and Such a Life; and a short story collection,The Least You Need to Know. He teaches in the MFA program at The Ohio State University, where he is a past winner of the Alumni Distinguished Teaching Award.
About Russell Banks
The author of more than a dozen novels and story collections as well as books of poetry and nonfiction, Russell Banks has received many literary honors and awards, including Guggenheim and NEA grants, the St. Lawrence Prize for fiction, the Ingram Merrill Award, the John Dos Passos Award and the Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His novels Continental Driftand Cloudsplitterwere Pulitzer Prize finalists; Affliction, Cloudsplitterand Lost Memory of Skinwere PEN/Faulkner Finalists. The Sweet Hereafter and Affliction have been adapted for feature films and three more film adaptations of Banks’ works are currently in development. Other titles by Russell Banks include The Darling, Success Stories, Searching for Survivors, Trailerpark, The Book of Jamaica, The New World, Hamilton Stark,and The Reserve. The Angel on the Roofis a collection of thirty years of Banks’s short fiction. He is also the author of Dreaming Up America, a book of essays. Banks has contributed poems, stories, and essays to The Boston Globe Magazine, Vanity Fair, The New York Times Book Review, Esquire, and other publications.
About the Bexley Community Book Club
Now in its sixth year, BCBC is a unique community-based vehicle for promoting lifelong learning and reading in Bexley and beyond. Past BCBC selected authors are Jennifer Egan, Jonathan Safran Foer, Billy Collins, Ann Patchett, Tobias Wolff and Pete Hamill. BCBC is a program of the Bexley Education Foundation.
Bexley Community Book Club Sponsors for 2013-2014 are Giant Eagle, Linda and Frank Kass, The First Bexley Bank, Ohio State’s University Hospital East, PNC and US Realty Consultants. BCBC’s Community Partners for 2013-14 are Bexley Public Library, The Book Loft of German Village, Drexel Theatre, JCC of Greater Columbus, The Ohio State University Creative Writing Program, The Ohio State University Humanities Institute, and Thurber House.
About the Bexley Education Foundation
The Bexley Education Foundation (BEF) exists to encourage and enhance excellence in the Bexley City Schools. Through the generosity of Bexley parents, alumni, faculty and other donors, BEF makes grants to support new learning opportunities for students throughout the district – projects and programs that would not be possible within the regular school budget. For more information about the Bexley Education Foundation, contact the BEF office at (614) 338-2093 or BEF@bexleyschools.org, or visit BEF on Facebook or at www.bexleyeducationfoundation.org.
