National Book Award–Winning Novelist Richard Powers to Read at Bard College on April 16
 

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.— On Monday, April 16, National Book Award–winning novelist Richard Powers will read from his latest book, The Overstory, at Bard College. Writing of his work in the New York Review of Books, Margaret Atwood said, “If Powers were an American writer of the nineteenth century . . . he’d probably be the Herman Melville of Moby-Dick. His picture is that big.” Powers will be introduced by novelist and Bard literature professor Bradford Morrow. The reading, presented as part of Morrow’s Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series, takes place at 2:30 p.m. at Weis Cinema in the Bertelsmann Campus Center and will be followed by a Q&A. It is free and open to the public; no reservations are required. Bard’s literary journal, Conjunctions, will be giving away a limited number of copies of its Twentieth Anniversary Issue, which features an excerpt from Powers’s novel The Time of Our Singing.

After viewing August Sander’s photograph Young Farmers, Richard Powers was inspired to quit his job as a computer programmer and write his first novel. Powers spent the next two years penning Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, then moved to the Netherlands, where he wrote Prisoner’s Dilemma, a work that juxtaposes Disney and nuclear warfare. His other novels include The Echo Maker (2006), which won the National Book Award for fiction and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and Gain (1998), which won the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for best historical fiction. Powers’s works explore music, genetics, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality. His novels have been named best books of the year by the Chicago Tribune, Newsday, Christian Science Monitor, London Evening Standard, and others. Powers was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1989 and received a Lannan Literary Award in 1999. In 2010 and 2013, Powers was a Stein Visiting Writer at Stanford University, during which time he assisted in the lab of biochemist Aaron Straight. He currently lives in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains.

For more information about the Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series, please call 845-758-7054, email nnyhan@bard.edu, or visit conjunctions.com.(4.4.18)
 

This event was last updated on 04-07-2018

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