61st Annual Florida Writers’ Festival

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Gainesville, Fla. – Three award-winning authors will visit Gainesville November 5 and 6 for the 61st Florida Writers’ Festival. Hosted by the University of Florida’s MFA Program in Creative Writing (MFA@FLA) and sponsored by the Alachua County Library District and the Friends of the George A. Smathers Library, the Festival brings nationally distinguished poets and fiction writers to the UF campus for a two-day series of readings and lectures. The festival is free and open to the public. This year’s Festival presents the following authors:

• Henri Cole is the author of seven collections of poetry. His book Middle Earth was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.
• James Lasdun has published short-story and poetry collections, novels, non-fiction, and screenplays. His new collection of stories, It’s Beginning to Hurt, was one of the Atlantic's Best Five Books of 2009.
• Wells Tower, named one of America’s twenty best writers under forty by The New Yorker magazine, is an author of fiction and non-fiction.

Schedule of Florida Writer’s Festival events:

• Friday, Nov. 5: Henri Cole and James Lasdun read from 8 – 10 p.m., Smathers Library East, UF Gainesville campus. The reading will be followed by a brief reception.
• Sat., Nov. 6: All three authors present 30-minute talks, followed by an informal reception, 1- 3 p.m., Alachua County Library Headquarters.
• Also on Sat., Nov. 6: Wells Tower reads, followed by a reception, 8 – 10 p.m., Smathers Library East, UF Gainesville campus.

MFA@FLA, the Program in Creative Writing at the University of Florida, is one of the oldest writing programs in the South, founded in 1948. MFA@FLA was recently ranked the 11th best creative writing program in the country by Poets & Writers magazine. For more information about the 2010 Florida Writers’ Festival, please contact Becca Evanhoe at 785.979.6651 or r.evanhoe@ufl.edu. Visit the MFA@FLA Web site: www.english.ufl.edu/crw.

About the Festival Writers

Henri Cole was born in Fukuoka, Japan, in 1956. He was reared in Virginia and graduated from. He holds graduate degrees from the College of William and Mary, the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, and Columbia University. He has published seven collections of poetry, and his poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. He teaches at Ohio State University and lives in Boston.

James Lasdun was born in London in 1958 and now lives in the US. He is a poet, fiction writer and screenwriter. He has published four collections of short stories, three poetry collections, two non-fiction books, and two novels. His co-screenwriting credits include Sunday, which won both Best Feature and Best Screenplay awards at Sundance, and Signs and Wonders. His most recent book is the short story collection It’s Beginning to Hurt.

Wells Tower is the author of Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, a collection of short fiction. Tower’s fiction and journalism have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, GQ, The New York Times, The Washington Post Magazine, The Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere. Tower was named one of America’s twenty best writers under forty by The New Yorker magazine. He divides his time between Chapel Hill, North Carolina and Brooklyn, New York.