Award-winning novelist Micheline Aharonian Marcom will read from her latest book, "A Brief History of Yes," to open the fall 2013 Carr Reading Series at 4:30 p.m. Sept. 18 in the Illini Union Bookstore. Marcom is the author of five novels. Her first, "Three Apples Fell From Heaven," was a New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times and Washington Post Book of the Year in 2001. It served as the first installment of her trilogy on the 1915-17 Armenian genocide and its aftermath. The Times Book Review credited the "fierce beauty of her prose" for confronting readers with "breathtaking cruelties" and carrying readers past them. She has written just as fiercely about love triangles, female sexuality and mourning in her other two novels, "The Mirror in the Well" and "A Brief History of Yes." She has received numerous fellowships and awards, including the PEN/USA Award for Fiction and a Fulbright Fellowship.
On Nov. 4, poets Ladan Osman and Roger Reeves will read from their works. Osman has received several fellowships, including one from the Michener Center for Writers, and her chapbook, "Ordinary Heaven," will appear in "African Poetry: A New Generation Anthology" next year. Reeves' poems have appeared in "Ploughshares," "American Poetry Review," "Boston Review" and others. He has received several awards and fellowships, including a 2013 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship.
Sara Levine will read on Nov. 13. She is the author of a short-story collection, "Short Dark Oracles," and "Treasure Island!!!" - a comedic novel in which the female protagonist uses Robert Louis Stevenson's classic as a self-help book, adopting boldness, resolution, independence and horn-blowing as her core values. The San Francisco Chronicle called the book "unstoppably funny and not a little frightening," and The New York Times described it as "a rollicking tale, shameless, funny and intelligent." She is a professor in the writing program at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
The readings take place in the Author's Corner on the second floor of the Illini Union Bookstore. All Carr events are free and open to the public.