UA Prose Series readings are co-sponsored by the UA College of Social & Behavioral Sciences and the Department of English.
The UA Prose Series, curated by faculty of the Creative Writing Program at the UA, presents prose writers of distinction.
In this second Prose Series event of 2016, Julie Iromuanya and Fenton Johnson, read from their latest books: Johnson’s The Man Who Loved Birds and Iromuanya’s debut novel, Mr. and Mrs. Doctor. This reading will be followed by a brief Q&A.
Fenton Johnson is the author of two novels, Crossing the River and Scissors, Paper, Rock, as well as Geography of the Heart: A Memoir and Keeping Faith: A Skeptic's Journey Among Christian and Buddhist Monks, a meditation on what it means for a skeptic to have and keep faith. Johnson has contributed cover essays to Harper's Magazine, the New York Times Magazine, and many literary quarterlies. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts (fiction and creative nonfiction), as well as two Lambda Literary Awards, a Kentucky Literary Award in creative nonfiction, and the American Library Association Award for best gay/lesbian nonfiction. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, and Sarah Lawrence College, and is on the faculty of the creative writing program at the University of Arizona. For more information and samples of his work, visit his webpage (and his blog) at www.fentonjohnson.com
Julie Iromuanya is a writer, scholar, and educator. Born and raised in the American Midwest, she is the daughter of Igbo Nigerian immigrants. Her creative writing has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Passages North, the Cream City Review, and the Tampa Review, among other journals. Her scholarly-critical work most recently appears in Converging Identities: Blackness in the Modern Diaspora (Carolina Academic Press). She has been shortlisted for several prizes, including the Kenyon Review Short Fiction Contest, the Glimmer Train Very Short Fiction and Family Matters contests, the Rona Jaffe Foundation fellowship, and the Miles Morland Writing Scholarship. Iromuanya earned her B.A. at the University of Central Florida, and her M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where she was a Presidential Fellow and award-winning teacher. She was the inaugural Herbert W. Martin Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Dayton. She has also been a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Iromuanya is Assistant Professor of English and African and African American Studies. Mr. and Mrs. Doctor is her first novel.