Tuessday, February 26
7:30 p.m. / Cowles Library Reading Room
TIM BASCOM
Tim Bascom's memoir - Chameleon Days: An American Boyhood in Ethiopia - won the Bakeless Literary Prize and was published by Mariner Books in 2006. An excerpt was selected by Jamaica Kincaid for the Best American Travel Writing 2005. Bascom has also published a novel and a critical study of Christianity in U.S. culture. A graduate of the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa, his essays have appeared in The Florida Review, Fourth Genre, Boulevard, Image, Modern Bride, and the in-flight magazine of China Airlines.

Thursday, March 27
7:30 pm / Cowles Library Reading Room
ALAN NADEL
Alen Nadel is the Endowed Chair of American Literature and Film in the Department of Engish at University of Kentucky. Nadel writes on American fiction, drama and film and is the author of numerous books, including Television in Black-and-White America: Race and National Identity (University Press of Kansas, 2005), Flatlining on the Field of Dreams: Cultural Narratives in the films of President Reagan's America (Rutgers University Press, 1997), Containment Culture: American Narrative, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age (Duke University Press, 1995), and Invisible Criticism: Ralph Ellison and the American Canon (University of Iowa Press, 1991). During his visit to Drake, Nadel will discuss "Revenge as a Faith-Based Narrative: Or, What's that Snake Doing Under Mel Gibson's Kilt?"

Tuessday, April 8
7:30 p.m. / Cowles Library Reading Room
DRAKE FACULTY READING: FRED ARROYO & ERICA ANZALONE
Fred Arroyo is the author of The Region of Lost Names: A Novel (University of Arizona Press, 2008). Arroyo's stories, poems, interviews, and reviews have appeared in various literary journals, and three of his essays are forthcoming in North Dakota Quarterly. A newly arrived assistant professor of English at Drake University, Arroyo enjoys teaching fiction and nonfiction writing classes. He's at work on a new novel, and a book of nonfiction.

Erica Anzalone, a visiting professor of English at Drake, came to us from the University of Iowa, where she received an MFA in poetry at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 2006. Her primary interests lie in modern and postmodern literature, and she teaches fiction and poetry workshops at Drake. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Pleiades, Sentence, Mary, Konundrum Engine Literary Review, Coconut, and Greatcoat.

Thursday, April 17
7:00 p.m. / Medbury Honors Lounge
DRAKE WRITERS' NIGHT
Students, faculty, staff, and alumni are invited to bring and read a poem, a piece of short fiction or drama, or a short essay at this event dedicated to celebrating and fostering the community of writers at Drake.

Wednesday, April 30
DES MOINES NATIONAL POETRY FESTIVAL 2008: LI-YOUNG LEE
Li-Young Lee is the author of Behind My Eyes (2008); Book of My Nights (2001), which won the 2002 William Carlos Williams Award; The City in Which I Love You (1991), which was the 1990 Lamont Poetry Selection; and Rose (1986), which won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award. His other work includes Breaking hte Alabaster Jar: Conversations with Li-Young Lee (2006),a collection of twelve interviews with Lee at various stages of his artistic development; and The Winged Seed: A Remembrance (1995), a memoir which received an American Book ward from the Before Columbus Foundation. Lee has been the recipient of a Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets, a Lannan Literary Award, a Whiting Writer's Award, the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award, the I.B. Lavan Award, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship