• Thursday, November 5th at 8:00 P.M. (Reading)

Mary Gaitskill will read in Memorial Hall at the University of Massachusetts as part of the M.F.A. Program's Visiting Writer Series.   Gaitskill is author of several novels & collections of short stories, including Because They Wanted To, Veronica, & most recently Don't Cry.   Gaitskill's honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002 & a PEN/Faulkner Award nomination for Because They Wanted To. Veronica was a National Book Award nominee, as well as a National Book Critics Circle finalist for that year.

• Friday, November 6th at 8:00 P.M.(Talk)

Miriam Pawel will talk about her new book, The Union of Their Dreams: Power, Hope, & Struggle in Cesar Chavez’s Farm Worker Movement.   Drawing on a rich trove of original documents, tapes, & interviews, Pawel chronicles the rise of the UFW during the heady days of civil rights struggles, the antiwar movement, & student activism in the 1960s & ’70s.   From the fields, the churches, and the classrooms, hundreds were drawn to “la causa” by the charismatic Chavez, a brilliant risk-taker who mobilized popular support for a noble cause.   But as Pawel shows, the UFW was ripped apart by the same man who built it, as Chavez proved unable to make the transition from movement icon to union leader.   Pawel traces the lives of several key members of the crusade, using their stories to weave together a powerful portrait of a movement and the people who made it.

• Tuesday, November 10th at 5:00 P.M.(Book launch party)

Join University of Massachusetts history professor Barry Levyin celebrating the publication of his new book, Town Born: The Political Economy of New England from Its Founding to the Revolution.   Levy argues that New England’s distinctive & egalitarian order was due neither to the colonists’ peasant traditionalism nor to the region’s inhospitable environment but, rather, a consequence of its innovative system of governance, which placed nearly all land under the control of several hundred self-governing town meetings.   As Town Born shows, these town meetings were not simply sites of empty democratic rituals but were used to organize, force, & reconcile laborers, families, & entrepreneurs into profitable export economies.   Levy has won two Mellon fellowships; two National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships & a Warren; & American Council of Learned Societies fellowship.   He is author of Quakers & the American Family: British Settlement in the Delaware Valley, 1650-1780.

• Thursday, November 12th at 8:00 P.M.(Reading)

Brad Leithauser will read from his new novel, The Art Student’s War.   Leithauser’s books include five collections of poetry, five previous novels, & various volumes that fall out of the usual categories, such as the novel-in-verse Darlington’s Fall; as well as two volumes of light verse with illustrations by his brother Mark Leithauser, Lettered Creatures & Toad to a Nightingale.   A MacArthur Fellow from 1983-1988, he was inducted into the Order of the Falcon by the President of Iceland in 2005 for his service in promoting Icelandic literature.   Sponsored by Amherst College Creative Writing center

• Friday, November 13th at 8:00 P.M.(Poetry reading)

Heather Christle & Christopher DeWeese will read from their recent poetry.   Christle & DeWeese received their M.F.A.s from the University of Massachusetts & now live in Atlanta.   Christle is author of a new volume of poetry, Difficult Farm.  

• Sunday, November 15th at 3:00 P.M.(Poetry reading)

“Jubilat/Jones Reading Series”   Dobby Gibson & Brett Ralph will read from their recent work as part of the jubilat/Jones Reading Series in the Trustees Room at the Jones Library, 43 Amity Street in Amherst.   Gibson is the author of Polar, which won the 2004 Beatrice Hawley Award, & Skirmish.   He lives in Minneapolis where he serves on the board of directors of The Loft Literary Center.   Ralph, who graduated from the M.F.A. Program here at the University of Massachusetts & now teaches at Hopkinsville Community College in Kentucky, is author of Black Sabbatical

The reading will be preceded by a ‘Poetry Swap' at 2:00 PM.

• Wednesday, November 18th at 5:00 P.M.(Book launch party)

Help us celebrate the publication of a new book by Amherst College professor Hilary Moss, Schooling Citizens: The Struggle for African American Education in Antebellum America.   While white residents of antebellum Boston & New Haven forcefully opposed the education of black residents, their counterparts in slaveholding Baltimore did little to resist the establishment of African American schools.   Such discrepancies, Moss argues, suggest that white opposition to black education was not a foregone conclusion.   Through the comparative lenses of these three cities, she shows why opposition erupted where it did across the United States during the same period that gave rise to public education.   At Amherst since 2004, Moss offers courses about the African-American experience from the slave trade to the present by drawing on social, cultural, intellectual & political history.   While her research concentrates on the early 19th century, she teaches about an array of contemporary educational issues, including magnet schools, school choice & residential segregation.

• Thursday, November 19th at 4:00 P.M.(Talk)

Val Vinokur, who teaches at the New School, will talk about his new book, The Trace of Judaism: Dostoevsky, Babel, Mandelstam, Levinas at the Amherst College Center for Russian Culture which is located on the second floor of Webster Hall at Amherst College.

• Thursday, November 19th at 8:00 P.M. (Poetry reading)

Charles Simic will read from his recent work at (note new location:) the University Gallery, Fine Arts Center, University of Massachusetts.   Simic is author of more than twenty-five volumes of poetry, memoirs & essays, including Metaphhysician in the Dark, Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell, That Little Something, & The World Doesn't End.   Simic was elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets in 2000.   He has has received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer; fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation; the MacArthur Foundation; the National Endowment for the Arts; & was elected to The American Academy of Arts & Letters in 1995.   He was the recipient of the 2007 Wallace Stevens Award by the Academy of American Poets in 2007.

• Friday, November 20th at 8:00 P.M.(Reading)

“Live Lit”   Students in the M.F.A. Program at the University of Massachusetts will read from their recent work.   Evenings usually include a mix of poetry & fiction.