Award-winning author, MacArthur Fellow, and Vassar’s Writer-in-Residence Colson Whitehead to deliver reading. Tuesday, February 20, 2007

POUGHKEEPSIE, NY – MacArthur Fellowship recipient and award-winning young writer Colson Whitehead will read from his widely praised 2006 novel Apex Hides the Hurt, on Tuesday, February 20, at 6:00 p.m., in the Villard Room of the College Center. This talk is free and open to the public, and will be among the highlights of Whitehead’s extended stay at Vassar (2/12 - 3/2) as the English department’s Writer-in-Residence.

ABOUT COLSON WHITEHEAD

The New York Times called Apex Hides the Hurt (March 2006), Whitehead’s third and most recent novel, “brilliant” and “exhilarating,” praising the novel’s critique of the consumer’s “perverse delight in the ingenious abuse of words.” The story endows the band-aid industry with mythic importance, and with this work, “Whitehead is making a strong case for a new name of his own,” Saul Austerlitz wrote in a review in The Boston Globe.

Colson Whitehead

At 37, Whitehead’s prestigious honors already include a MacArthur Fellowship and a Whiting Award, a highly competitive award given to “exceptional new writers” by the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation. A Manhattan native and former television critic for the Village Voice, Whitehead explains that he was inspired in his childhood to become a writer by reading comic books and Stephen King novels. His first novel, The Intuitionist (1999), a detective tale and racial allegory woven around the history of elevator construction, won Whitehead the Quality Paperback Book Club's New Voices Award.

John Henry Days (2001), his second book, reprised the legend of the African-American steel driver who was said to have outperformed the steel drill during the height of American railroad construction. The book won the Young Lions Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Prize, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Whitehead’s third effort, The Colossus of New York (2003), presents an impressionistic homage to the city of his birth, and the intricate workings that make the metropolis so grand. Whitehead has also written for The New York Times, New York Magazine, Granta, Harper's, and Salon.

ABOUT VASSAR’S WRITER-IN-RESIDENCE PROGRAM

As the 28th guest of the department of English’s Writer-in-Residence program, Whitehead joins an exclusive group of influential thinkers, including Leslie Marmon Silko, Stanley Kunitz, and Dagoberto Gilb. During his stay, which will last from February 12 to March 2, Whitehead will be meeting and working with students and faculty.

Individuals with disabilities requiring accommodations at Vassar should contact the Office of Campus Activities at (845)437-5370.

Vassar College is a highly selective, coeducational, independent, residential, liberal arts college founded in 1861.

Individuals with disabilities requiring accommodations or information on accessibility should contact Campus Activities Office at (845) 437-5370. Without sufficient notice, appropriate space and/or assistance may not be available.

Vassar College is a highly selective, coeducational, independent, residential liberal arts college founded in 1861.

This article was posted on Wednesday, February 14th, 2007.