The 10th Annual Villanova Literary Festival will feature the following writers (with all readings tentatively scheduled for 7:30). All readings are free.

Kathryn Davis (novelist)

Thursday, Jan. 24

Kathryn Davis is the author of six novels: Labrador (1988), The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf (1993), Hell: A Novel (1998), The Walking Tour (1999), and Versailles (2002).  Her sixth and most recent novel, The Thin Place, was released in January 2006. She has received a Kafka Prize for fiction by an American woman, the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Kathryn Davis taught creative writing and literature at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. In 2006, Kathryn Davis won a Lannan Foundation Literary Award. She is currently the senior fiction writer on the faculty of The Writing Program at Washington University in St. Louis.

Eavan Boland (poet)

Thursday, Feb. 21

Eavan Boland is the author of nine books of poetry.  She was born in Dublin in 1944 and lived in Ireland until she was six years old. At the age of six, she and her family moved to London, where Dr. Boland had her first experiences with anti-Irish sentiment. She later returned to Dublin to attend school and self-published a pamphlet of poetry (23 Poems) after her graduation. Dr. Boland received her BA from Trinity College, Dublin in 1966. Since that time she has held numerous teaching positions and published poetry, books and journal articles. She has published eight volumes of poetry, the most recent being In a Time of Violence with W.W. Norton and An Origin Like Water: Collected Poems 1967-87 (also with W.W. Norton). Her most recent published book is Against Love Poetry (2001).  She has received the Lannan Award for Poetry and has published a volume of prose called Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time. She currently lives in Dublin, Ireland, and Stanford, California, where she is a professor of English at Stanford University and directs the creative writing program.
Dr. Boland’s reading is co-sponsored by Irish Studies.

Hermann Carrillo (novelist)

Thursday, March 27

H. G. Carrillo is the author of Loosing My Espanish, a novel centered around the Cuban-American community in Chicago, which was first published by Pantheon Books in 2004 and later by Anchor Books in 2005. His short stories have appeared in Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, Glimmer Train, Ninth Letter, Conjunctions and other journals and publications. Mr. Carrillo earned Master of Arts and Master of Fine Arts degrees at Cornell University. He has taught at Cornell and has served as visiting writer in residence at Knox College.  He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at The George Washington University, where he is at work on a novel.
Mr. Carrillo’s reading is co-sponsored by Africana Studies.

Richard McCann (novelist, poet)

Tuesday, April 8

Richard McCann is the author of Mother of Sorrows (2006), a work of fiction which presents ten interwoven stories of an American family starting out in the post-World War II suburbs of Washington, D.C., a world of identical brick houses and sun struck, treeless lawns.  He is also the author of Ghost Letters, a collection of poems which won the Beatrice Hawley Award (1994), as well as the Capricorn Poetry Award (1993). Dr. McCann is also the editor (with Michael Klein) of Things Shaped in Passing: More “Poets for Life” Writing from the AIDS Pandemic. His fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in such magazines as The Atlantic, Ms., Esquire, Ploughshares, Tin House, and the Washington Post Magazine, and in numerous anthologies, including The Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories and Best American Essays 2000. He is currently working on a memoir, The Resurrectionist, which explores the experience and meanings of illness and mortality through a narrative exploration of his experience as a liver transplant recipient. Dr. McCann earned his MA in Creative Writing and Modern Literature from Hollins University, and his Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Iowa, where he was a Rockefeller Fellow. He now lives in Washington, D.C., where he teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at American University.

Arthur Sze (poet)

Thursday, April 24

Arthur Sze, an internationally known poet, taught at the Institute of American Indian Arts for more than a decade, where he is now a Professor Emeritus. He is also the first poet laureate of Santa Fe. Mr. Sze is a second-generation Chinese-American, and was born in New York City in 1950. He is the author of eight books of poetry, including Quipu (Copper Canyon Press, 2005), The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970-1998 (1998), and Archipelago (1995). Other collections by Mr. Sze include River River (1987), Dazzled (1982), Two Ravens (1976; revised, 1984), and The Willow Wind (1972; revised, 1981). His poems have also appeared in numerous magazines. He is the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, a Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, two National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing fellowships, a George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation Fellowship, three grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, and a Western States Book Award for Translation.