March 9, 2001

Loyola hosts evenings with five great authors

The five extraordinary figures coming to Loyola University have inspired readers to pick up their books twice, pass them to friends, tell relatives and strike up conversation about them with strangers in the aisles of libraries and supermarkets. In a span of 10-short days, members of the Loyola community will have the opportunity to see, meet, and listen to five great modern authors who will read their latest works.

Among the visiting writers are Loyola's own John Biguenet, professor of English; Bro. Guy Consalmagno, S.J., curator of the Vatican's meteorite collection; Jonathan Coleman, journalist, and book editor; Michael Cunningham, winner of the 1999 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction; and Claribel Alegria, internationally known poet and author. All of these events are free and open to the public.

Biguenet's debut collection of short stories, The Torturer's Apprentice, has garnered praise from every corner of the country. The New York Times Book Critic Katherine Wolff wrote that Bigunet's stories "demonstrate a genuine artistry" and the British rights to the book were recently sold. His stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories in 1997, 1998 and 1999.

During an event aptly titled "An Evening with John Biguenet," The Robert Hunter Distinguished Professor will read selected stories at 7 p.m. Thursday, March 22, in Nunemaker Auditorium. A booksigning will follow.

In the third installment of the Tem-pleton/American Scientific Affiliation Lecture Series, the university welcomes acclaimed speaker, teacher, astronomer, and author Brother Guy J. Consolmagno, S.J. Consolmagno's lecture is titled "Is Theology an Experimental Science?" and will be delivered on Tuesday, March 20, at 7:30 p.m. in Nunemaker Auditorium.

At the Vatican Observatory since 1993, Consolmagno is presently the curator of the Vatican's meteorite collection, one of the largest in the world. His research explores the connections between meteorites and asteroids, and the origin and evolution of small bodies in the solar system. He has written four books and nearly 100 scientific presentations and publications. Two are devoted to teaching astronomy: a popular telescope guide, Turn Left at Orion; and a planetary science textbook, Worlds Apart. The Way to the Dwelling of Light and Brother Astronomer: Adventures of a Vatican Scientist are popular books exploring science and its relation to religious life.

Best-selling author of At Mother's Request and Exit the Rainmaker, Jonathan Coleman comes to campus Tuesday, March 27, at 7:30 p.m. in Nunemaker Auditorium. An invited guest of the Biever Guest Lecture Series, Coleman will discuss "Writing About What's Uncomfortable: Race and Class, A Lecture About the Exploration of Race in America." In his latest book, Long Way to Go: Black & White in America, the former journalist shows not only how far America has come in race relations in the 30 years since the Civil Rights movement, but compels the reader to consider how far they want to go in resolving this dilemma. Long Way to Go is listed as recommended reading in "Bridging the Racial Divide" (published by the Center for Living Democracy) and in a publication from the Study Circles Resources Center that is used by facilitators and participants in race relations dialogue groups. Published in 1997, Long Way is a seven-year exploration of race in America today. The book is based on interviews Coleman conducted in the racially tense area of Milwaukee, Wisconsin in the 1990s.

Coleman has written extensively for national publications including The New Yorker, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, the New York Times Book Review, and the Chicago Tribune. He also was an advisor to President Bill Clinton's Race Initiative. The lecture is co-sponsored by the Department of English and Department of Sociology, with additional support from The Diversity Champions Committee and the Twomey Center for Peace Through Justice.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Cunningham makes his appearance Wednesday, March 28, at 7:30 p.m. in Nunemaker Auditorium where he will read from his third novel The Hours. Cunningham received the 1999 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and the 1999 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for The Hours.

The Hours draws on the life and work of Virginia Woolf and intertwines it into the lives of two contemporary women. Identifying with Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Cunningham's characters Clarissa Vaughan and Laura Brown struggle individually to cope with their own conflicting claims of love and inheritance, hope and despair. In The New York Times Michael Wood calls the award-winning work, "a delicate, triumphant glance, an acknowledgment of Woolf that takes her into Cunningham's own territory, a place of late-century danger but also of treasurable hours." Cunningham has been described as "one of our very best writers" by Richard Eder of The Los Angeles Times. His two other works are Caught at the End of the World and Flesh and Blood. The Biever Guest Lecture Series made this event possible.

Internationally-known poet and author Claribel Alegria will lecture and read from her work Thursday, March 29, at 7 p.m. in Nunemaker Auditorium. Alegria, who studied at Loyola, has had a long and productive career as one of the major voices in Latin American letters. In her work, she emphasizes her commitment to nonviolent resistance and confronts the political realities of Central America. Born in Nicaragua, she was raised in El Salvador and considers herself a political exile.

Her most recent book of poetry Sorrow (1999) was written after the death of her longtime collaborator, translator and husband, Darwin Flakoll. The tone in these poems is one of bittersweetness that comes from love, grief, and solitude but never self-pity or despair. She also writes of hope that emerges from her sorrow.

One critic has discussed paradoxes in her work, "as her writing blurs boundaries between fiction and autobiography and poetry and prose." Even her poems that give voice to the victims of dictatorship and death squads are love poems to the land and the people where she was nurtured.

Alegria has published 40 books including 14 books of poetry, four short novels, and a book of children's stories. In collaboration with Flakoll, she published a novel, several books of testimony, and a number of anthologies of poetry. Her books have been translated into English, French, Dutch, and Polish. Her poems have been translated into 14 languages.