John Edgar Wideman: 2009 Janet Weis Fellow in Contemporary Letters
John Edgar Wideman will receive the Janet Weis Fellow in Contemporary Letters Award and give a talk on:
Tuesday, Sept. 29, 8 p.m.
Weis Center for the Performing Arts at Bucknell
About John Edgar Wideman:
An award-winning novelist, short story writer, and essayist, John Edgar Wideman is renowned for compassionate and intelligent work that explores the range of human emotions. More interested in asking questions than answering them, he believes we all have the capacity for great good and great evil. His visit to Bucknell is certain to be thought-provoking and memorable.
A professor of Africana Studies and English at Brown University, Wideman has taught at the University of Wyoming; the University of Pennsylvania, where he founded and chaired the African American Studies Department; and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst's MFA Program for Poets and Writers.
Awards:
- Only writer to have been awarded the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction twice -- (1984 for his novel Sent for You Yesterday and again in 1991 for Philadelphia Fire)
- Rea Award for the Short Story (1998)
- American Book Award for Fiction (1991)
- Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction (1991)
- MacArthur Award (1993)
Other honors:
- St. Botolph Literary Award (1993)
- DuSable Museum Prize for Nonfiction for Brothers and Keepers (1985)
- Longwood College Medal for Literary Excellence (1987)
- National Magazine Editors' Prize for Short Fiction (1987)
- Edited the annual anthology The Best American Short Stories (Houghton Mifflin, 1996)
More about Wideman :
