We invite you to join us in celebrating the rich legacy of creative writing at Sweet Briar College. Faculty Nell Boeschenstein, John Gregory Brown, and John Casteen will read from their work on Saturday, May 9, at 6:30 P.M. at the University of Virginia’s Colonnade Club.
Nell Boeschenstein received her MFA from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in the Morning News, the Rumpus, the Believer, Newsweek, the Guardian, and elsewhere. Prior to Sweet Briar, she worked as a producer at Fresh Air, taught English as a second language in Slovakia, and worked as an assistant for Pete Seeger.
Born and raised in New Orleans, John Gregory Brown is the author of the novels Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery (Houghton Mifflin, 1994); The Wrecked, Blessed Body of Shelton Lafleur (Houghton Mifflin, 1996); and Audubon’s Watch (Houghton Mifflin, 2001). His fourth novel, A Thousand Miles from Nowhere, will be published by Little, Brown in 2016. His honors include a Lyndhurst Prize, the Lillian Smith Award, the John Steinbeck Award, and the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Book of the Year Award. He is the Julia Jackson Nichols Professor of English at Sweet Briar College and lives in Virginia. He and his wife, the novelist Carrie Brown, have three children.
John Casteen is the author of Free Union (2009) and For the Mountain Laurel (2011) from the VQR Poetry Series, published by the University of Georgia Press. Recent or forthcoming poems appear in Fence, the Southern Review, the Paris Review, From the Fishouse, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, and other magazines, and in Best American Poetry and The Rumpus Poetry Anthology. He has contributed personal and topical nonfiction to Offline, the Morning News, Virginia Quarterly Review, Slate, the Washington Post, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and other magazines and newspapers. He lives in Earlysville, Virginia, and teaches poetry at Sweet Briar College, where he founded and directs the Sweet Briar Undergraduate Creative Writing Conference.