Rosanna Warren and Sven Birkerts

Poet Rosanna Warren and Author Sven Birkerts

The Curry College Lecture Series on Creative Writing, hosted by Writer in Residence Bill Littlefield, proudly presented award-winning poet Rosanna Warren and renowned author, critic, and essayist Sven Birkerts in March 2003 to the Curry Community.

Rosanna Warren has written several collections of poetry including Stained Glass, which won the 1993 Lamont Award from the Academy of American Poets, Each Leaf Shines Separate, and Snow Day. She has also published a translation of Euripides’s Suppliant Women and edited The Art of Translation: Voices from the Field. She is Emma MacLachlan Metcalf Professor of the Humanities at Boston University and has previously served as a Resident in Literature at the American Academy of Rome and poet in residence at the Robert Frost Farm in Franconia, N.H. Rosanna Warren is the daughter of the great Southern novelist, poet, essayist and critic of great distinction Robert Penn Warren.

Sven Birkerts is the author of six books, including The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age, and his most recent book, a memoir entitled My Sky Blue Trades: Growing Up Counter in a Contrary Time. A celebrated critic and essayist, he has written dozens of articles and contributed to the New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, The Nation, and The Boston Globe among a variety of other newspapers and magazines. He has recently assumed the editorship of Agni, the distinguished literary magazine published at Boston University for the past thirty years.

How do you write a page-turner that keeps readers up until three in the morning, unable to put it down? Curry College hosted a panel of mystery authors who revealed all about their craft in March 2003.

Best-selling author Linda Barnes joined the pseudonymous Milton mystery author G. H. Ephron, and local mystery author Leslie Wheeler in a panel discussion titled “It's a Mystery to Me: The mystery novel from idea to finished book.”

Linda Barnes is the author of nine Carlotta Carlyle mysteries and winner of the Anthony and American Mystery Awards. In her latest, The Big Dig (ST. Martin’s Minotaur), Carlotta Carlyle, the six-foot-tall redheaded private investigator returns to work undercover searching out fraud on Boston’s Big Dig.

Writer Hallie Ephron and neuropsychologist Donald Davidoff share the pseudonym G. H. Ephron. They write a critically acclaimed mystery series featuring forensic psychologist Dr. Peter Zak. Their novels – Amnesia; Addiction; and their latest, Delusion – are set in Cambridge and use the mystery genre to explore different aspects of human psychology. Hallie is a former Curry faculty member, and is married to physics professor Jerold Touger.

Leslie Wheeler is the author of Murder at Plimoth Plantation (Larcom Press). Her books bring alive the history we think we know so well, enlivening it with rich characterizations and modern-day disputes. As readers follow the clues of past and present, the mythic figures of history become as real as the people next door. She has also written biography of Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell and co-authored the widely used American history textbook America: The People and the Dream (Scott Foresman, 1990).

The Fall ’03 Littlefield Lecture
featured scholar and author Leslie Epstein

Leslie has been Director of the Creative Writing Program at Boston University for more than twenty years, is a former Rhodes Scholar, and has published nine books of fiction of which the best-known, King of the Jews, has become a classic of Holocaust Fiction and published in eleven foreign languages.