Writers Series continues with faculty readings

The GVSU Writers Series resumes with Writing Department faculty readings by three assistant professors, Caitlin Horrocks, Amorak Huey and Oindrila Mukherjee on Thursday, January 26, at 7 p.m. in the Cook-DeWitt Center, Allendale Campus.

“Grand Valley’s writing professors are practicing writers in addition to teachers,” said Horrocks, who organizes the series. “We’re excited to have this opportunity to share our work with the campus community.”

Horrocks is author of the story collection This Is Not Your City. Her fiction appears in The Best American Short Stories 2011, The Pushcart Prize XXXV, the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2009, The Paris Review and elsewhere. Her work has won awards including the Plimpton Prize, a Bread Loaf Writers Conference Fellowship, and scholarships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the Norman Mailer Writers Colony. She has a bachelor’s degree from Kenyon College and an MFA from Arizona State University.

Huey worked for 15 years in Florida, Kentucky and Michigan as a reporter and editor before leaving the newspaper business. He received an MFA in creative writing from Western Michigan University and is managing editor of the new online journal Wake: Great Lakes Thought & Culture. His poetry appears and is forthcoming in a number of print and online journals, including Oxford American, The Southern Review, Linebreak and Spitball, among others. He recently completed a collection of poems inspired by the blues.

Mukherjee was born in Kolkata, India. She has a doctorate degree in literature and creative writing from the University of Houston, an MFA from the University of Florida, a bachelor’s and master’s in English from the University of Cambridge, and a bachelor’s degree from Jadavpur University. She has worked as a journalist for The Statesman, India’s oldest English language newspaper, and served as fiction editor and review editor for Gulf Coast magazine. She is currently completing her first novel, The Extraordinary Sins of Ordinary Indians. Besides fiction, she writes plays and nonfiction, and translates Bengali literature to English. Her short story, “The Ways We Cook Fish,” a finalist in Glimmer Train’s “Family Matters” contest, is forthcoming in Hopewell Publication’s Best New Writing 2010.

Upcoming in the series are craft talks and readings by:  playwright Randy Wyatt, February 13; poet L.S. Klatt, February 20; and creative nonfiction and poetry by Joe Wilkins, March 13. For more information, visit www.gvsu.edu/artscalendar, or contact Caitlin Horrocks at x1-8022.