Jim Zervanos
Fiction Reading: Saturday October 24
4 p.m. Bucknell Hall
Homecoming Alumni Poetry & Fiction Readings

Jim Zervanos is the author of the novel LOVE Park (Cable Publishing, 2009).  His work has appeared in Cimarron Review, Green Mountains Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, and other publications. Originally from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, he moved to Philadelphia in 1992 after graduating with his Master's degree from Bucknell University. Since then he has attended Temple Law School, waited tables, interned at Philadelphia magazine, and taught high school English in the suburbs.  He lives with his wife in Philadelphia.

From LOVE Park: 

     At twenty-one, I believed I was going to write a book that would immortalize Philadelphia.  I thought of my hometown as a museum without walls, harboring future relics—the sky-blue buildings reaching ever higher into the clouds, the Art Museum, another artifact, atop the city’s own Acropolis, the boulevard leading to LOVE Park, fountains gushing pink water before City Hall’s blunt, pale tower.  The opening line came to me just as Dorothy Maloney snapped a picture of the two of us, author and photographer, posing for the dustcover, side by side at the base of the LOVE sculpture, bound together for eternity.  This is love, I thought.  Then:  This is LOVE. 
     I had met Dorothy Maloney in an Eastern Religion seminar our junior year at Temple University, just after she’d vowed to purify herself by abstaining from alcohol, drugs, and sex.  She was re-virginizing, she explained to me, and I sympathized with her spiritual crisis.  I was picking up a Religion minor in hopes of making my Greek Orthodoxy seem an informed choice, not just something I was born into.