{"id":76952,"date":"2014-03-25T14:01:09","date_gmt":"2014-03-25T18:01:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/?p=76952"},"modified":"2016-07-01T11:14:20","modified_gmt":"2016-07-01T15:14:20","slug":"bates-presents-first-maine-reading-by-colson-whitehead-author-of-john-henry-days-intuitionist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2014\/03\/25\/bates-presents-first-maine-reading-by-colson-whitehead-author-of-john-henry-days-intuitionist\/","title":{"rendered":"Bates presents first Maine reading by Colson Whitehead, author of ‘John Henry Days,’ ‘Intuitionist’"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Colson<\/a>

Colson Whitehead, author of the forthcoming “The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky, and Death.” (Frank Lojciechowski)<\/p><\/div>\n

Colson Whitehead, an author whose 2001 novel John Henry Days<\/em> was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, reads from his work at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, March 27, in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives at Bates College, 70 Campus Ave.<\/p>\n

Sponsored by the English department and other Bates offices and programs, this Language Arts Live reading is open to the public at no cost. For more information, please contact 207-753-6963.<\/p>\n

Whitehead visits Bates for his first Maine reading just weeks before the release of his next book, The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky, and Death<\/em> (Doubleday), a nonfiction account of his experiences at the 2011 World Series of Poker.<\/p>\n

Best known as a novelist, Whitehead’s latest entry in that genre is the best-seller Zone One<\/em> (Doubleday, 2011), a tale of life in New York after a disease leaves much of humanity zombified. “Leave it to the supremely thoughtful and snarkily funny Whitehead to do interesting things with a topic that lately has seated itself in the public\u2019s imagination,” wrote a Seattle Times<\/em> reviewer.<\/p>\n

“Not just a juicy experiment in genre fiction but a brilliantly disguised meditation on a ‘flatlined culture’ in need of its own rejuvenating psychic jolt.”<\/p>\n

Among Whitehead’s other novels (all on Doubleday) are The Intuitionist<\/em> (1999), Esquire Magazine<\/em>‘s best first novel of the year; and Apex Hides the Hurt<\/em> (2006), winner of the PEN Oakland Award. In addition to the Pulitzer consideration, John Henry Days<\/em> won the Young Lions Fiction Award and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.<\/p>\n

Born in New York in 1969, Whitehead also wrote a collection of essays about his home town, 2003’s The Colossus of New York<\/em>.<\/p>\n

“Lovers of adventurous literary fiction relished Whitehead’s novels, recognizing him as an original, sardonic, yet compassionate writer,” Donna Seaman wrote in a Booklist<\/em> review of Colossus<\/em>.<\/p>\n

“Anointed with a MacArthur ‘genius’ grant, Whitehead now presents a ravishing cycle of imaginative and evocative prose poems in tribute to his home, New York City, the quintessential metropolis of dreams.\u00a0 . . . Whitehead riffs poignantly and playfully on myriad strategies for urban survival as he incisively distills the kaleidoscopic frenzy of the city into startlingly vital metaphors and cartoon-crisp analogies.”<\/p>\n

Whitehead’s shorter works have appeared in The New York Times<\/em>, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Harper’s <\/em>and Grantland<\/em>, the sports and pop-culture blog that sent him to the World Series of Poker.<\/p>\n

In addition to the MacArthur Fellowship, Whitehead has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award and a fellowship at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.<\/p>\n

Whitehead is a lecturer in creative writing in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton. A Harvard graduate, Whitehead’s first job in publishing was at the Village Voice, where he reviewed television, books and music.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Novelist Colson Whitehead reads from his work on March 27 in the Muskie Archives at Bates.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":148,"featured_media":76953,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"categories":[4,133],"tags":[3271,178],"class_list":["post-76952","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academic-life","category-creativity","tag-english6","tag-language-arts-live"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76952","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/148"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76952"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76952\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":76954,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76952\/revisions\/76954"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/76953"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76952"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76952"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76952"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}