The Modern Masters Reading Series, sponsored by the writing department and with support from the Center for the Humanities, brings nationally and internationally known writers to Loyola's campus.
Through visiting writers who represent diverse backgrounds and a variety of genres, our student-writers learn to see literature as a living art produced by actual people whose anecdotes and asides offer illuminating insights into their vision and approach to craft. From small-group workshops to class visits to open question-and-answer sessions, Loyola’s writing students have the rare opportunity to speak directly to successful authors.
In recent years, the most gratifying responses to our guests—contemporary writers of distinguished achievement—have come from Loyola students: apprentice writers who, in many cases, have never before attended a reading, have never been part of a "great audience," and do not know what to expect from such an event.
We’re always open to suggestions for future readers from the entire Loyola community. Please feel free to contact the Modern Masters committee (Ron Tanner, Jane Satterfield, and Elizabeth Leik) with any questions or ideas for next year's series. Or, you may call 410-617-2228 for more information.
2012-2013 Schedule
All readings at 5 p.m. in the Andrew White Student Center 4th Floor Program Room. They are free and open to the public.
Monday, September 17: Adam Johnson
Adam Johnson is the author of a short story collection Emporium (2002) and has published two novels: Parasites Like Us (California Book Award winner, 2003) and The Orphan Master’s Son (2012). His fiction has appeared in Esquire, The Paris Review, Harper's, Tin House, Granta, and Playboy, as well as The Best American Short Stories. Johnson has received a Whiting Writers' Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Swarthout Writing Award, a Kingsbury Fellowship, and a Stegner Fellowship, the Gina Berriault Literary Award. He lives in San Francisco and teaches at Stanford University.
Monday, October 22: Judith Baumel
Poet, critic, and translator Judith Baumel is Professor of English at Adelphi University and lectures on contemporary American poetry at Oxford University, UK. A former director of the Poetry Society of America, her work has been published in Poetry, The Yale Review, Agni Review, The New York Times, and The New Yorker. Baumel’s poetry collections are The Kangaroo Girl (2011), The Weight of Numbers (1988 Walt Whitman Award) and Now (1996). Baumel has received awards from The New York Foundation for the Arts, Bronx Recognizes Its Own, and fellowships for residencies at Yaddo, Saltonstall, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
Monday, November 12: Randall Kenan
Randall Kenan’s books include the novel A Visitation of Spirits (1989), a short story collection, Let the Dead Bury Their Dead (1992 National Book Critics Circle Award finalist), a young adult biography, James Baldwin: American Writer (1993) and Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (1999). Kenan is the editor of The Cross of Redemption: The Uncollected Writings of James Baldwin (2010). The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, the Sherwood Anderson Award, the John Dos Passos Award, and the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Kenan teaches at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
Spring 2013
Tuesday, February 5: Helen Benedict
Helen Benedict is the author of eleven books, including six novels, most recently Sand Queen (Soho Press, 2011). A professor at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, her latest nonfiction book was The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq (2009). Benedict’s play, The Lonely Soldier Monologues was performed in New York City in 2009 and 2010. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, Salon, Huffington Post, The Washington Post, The Diane Rehm Show, CBC’s The Sunday Edition, BBC News and many other publications. She has received fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell, and the Freedom Forum.
Tuesday, March 19: Juliana Baggott
Julianna Baggott, a Loyola University Maryland graduate has authored seventeen books, including The Miss America Family, The Madam, the national bestseller Girl Talk, and, most recently, Pure, a post-apocalyptic dystopian novel. She publishes fiction for younger readers under the name “N.E. Bode,” most notably The Anybodies Trilogy. Baggott is the author of three poetry collections, including Lizzie Borden in Love. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Best American Poetry, Best Creative Nonfiction, NPR’s Talk of the Nation, and All Things Considered. She teaches at Florida State University.
Thursday, April 4: Suzanne Roberts
Travel writer and poet Suzanne Roberts is the author of five books, most recently the hiking memoir, Almost Somewhere: Twenty-Eight Days on the John Muir Trail (2012). Her poems, stories, and essays have been published in many American and Canadian literary journals and anthologies, such as Smartish Pace, ZYZZYVA, ISLE, Poems & Plays, Fourth River, Spillway, The MacGuffin, National Geographic Traveler, Alligator Juniper, Atlanta Review, Gulf Stream, South American Explorers, Traveler, and elsewhere. Named “The Next Great Travel Writer” by National Geographic Traveler Magazine, Roberts’ blogs appear regularly for National Geographic Traveler’s Intelligent Travel.