The 73rd McKinney Writing Contest and Reading

A Vollmer Fries Lecture

by

Lydia Davis

Winner of the 2013 Man Booker International Prize

 

Wednesday, April 16, 2014

8:00 p.m.

Biotech Auditorium,

Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies Building

RPI

Reception to follow

 

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

 

 

As we've done for several years now, Friends has again contributed $250 toward the McKinney Writing Contest, Rensselaer's annual writing competition administered by the Department of Communication and Media.  The contest offers both undergraduate and graduate students an opportunity for assessment and recognition of their creative writing talent. Work can be submitted in one or more of the following areas:  fiction/drama, poetry, essay, and electronic media. This year's awards will be presented by short story writer and translator Lydia Davis, who will first give a reading from one of her works and then answer questions from the audience.  


Lydia Davis
(Photo by David Ignaszewski)

Davis is the author of story collections Almost No Memory (1997), Samuel Johnson is Indignant (2001), Varieties of Disturbance (2007), The Collected Stories (2009), and most recently Can't and Won't (2014).  She is also a novelist, essayist, and translator from French and other languages, and has produced several new translations of French literary classics, including Marcel Proust's Swann's Way and Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary.  Davis is known for her concise short stories.  Characteristically, they usually run between three and four pages.  The New Yorker praised her "lucidity, aphoristic brevity, formal originality, sly comedy, metaphysical bleakness, philosophical pressure, and human wisdom." Davis currently is a professor of creative writing at the University at Albany.
 

  



Barbara Lewis, Chair of Friends of the Folsom Library's Board of Directors and Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Media, is coordinating the event.


Adrienne Birchler
Coordinator
Friends of the Folsom Library