WRITING THE MAGIC CARPET OF LITERATURE
Editor Alane Salierno Mason discusses writing, editing, and publishing with two of her authors, Mary Helen Stefaniak and Randall Kenan.
Tuesday October 12, 2010 4 to 5 p.m. Pleasants Family Assembly Room, Wilson Library, UNC-Chapel Hill.
Free and open to the public
Professor Randall Kenan of the Creative Writing Program moderates a discussion with novelist Mary Helen Stefaniak and the editor they share, UNC 2010 Distinguished Alumna Alane Salierno Mason, as they reflect on the processes of writing and editing and publishing, and on the many things they have learned from the South – and the world – about literature.
Alane Salierno Mason graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill with a BA in English in 1986. The first book she ever saw through the publishing process, from acquisition to editing to promotion, was Let the Dead Bury Their Dead: Stories, by Randall Kenan. She is now a vice-president and senior editor at W. W. Norton & Company, and is also the founder and president of Words Without Borders, a not-for-profit organization for the translation and promotion of international literature.
Mary Helen Stefaniak is the author of the recently published The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia– a September 2010 selection of the independent bookseller consortium Indie Next (“Great Reads from Booksellers You Trust”) — and of The Turk and My Mother (2004), both published by W. W. Norton & Company in New York. She teaches at Creighton University. Visit her on the Web at <www.maryhelenstefaniak.com>.
Randall Kenan is the author of A Visitation of Spirits (1989), Let the Dead Bury Their Dead (1992), a young adult biography of James Baldwin (1993), Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (1999), and The Fire this Time (2007). From 1985 to 1989 he worked on the editorial staff of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., publishers in New York. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, and the John Dos Passos Award. He won the 1997 Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the North Carolina Award for Literature in 2005.
This event is co-sponsored by the Creative Writing Program and the Center for the Study of the American South, both at UNC-Chapel Hill and is free and open to the public.