UA’s Bankhead Visiting Writers Series Welcomes Sigrid Nunez and Aimee Bender

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – The Bankhead Visiting Writers Series welcomes Sigrid Nunez and Aimee Bender to The University of Alabama campus in March.

Nunez will read on March 20 at 7:30 p.m. in 205 Smith Hall. While at UA, she also will give a lecture on March 21 at noon in 301 Morgan Hall.

She is the author of four novels, “A Feather on the Breath of God,” “Naked Sleeper,” “Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury” and “For Rouenna,” which was a New York Times notable book in 2001. Her short fictions have appeared in The Threepenny Review, Iowa Review, Salmagundi, Fiction and the New England Review.

Her writing has been widely anthologized, broadcast on National Public Radio, and has garnered her two Pushcart prizes, a Whiting Writer’s Award, and the 2000-2001 Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is the recipient of a Lannan Foundation Residency, has held the position of Writer in Residence at Ucross Foundation, and was a finalist in the PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction in 1995. She has taught at Smith College, Amherst College, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Rope Walk Writer’s Retreat and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

Aimee Bender will read at UA on March 27 at 7:30 p.m. in 205 Smith Hall. She is the author of two books, “The Girl in the Flammable Skirt,” a New York Times Notable Book for 1998 and “An Invisible Sign of my Own” (2000).

Her writing has appeared in Fence, Harper’s Magazine, GQ, LA Weekly, The Missouri Review, Granta, Faultline, Colorado Review, Story, North American Review, Antioch Review and The Paris Review. She received an MFA from the University of California at Irvine and currently teaches creative writing at the University of Southern California. Bender lives in Los Angeles.

The Bankhead Visiting Writers Series is made possible by an endowment from the Bankhead Foundation, The University of Alabama’s Program in Creative Writing, the department of English and the College of Arts and Sciences. For more information, please contact UA’s creative writing program at 205/348-0766 or visit www.bama.ua.edu/~writing/.