SHERMAN, TEXAS—Austin College will present “Poetry Readings in English and Spanish” by Kirk Nesset on Wednesday, February 19, at 4:30 p.m. in Caruth Administration Building, Room 201. The event, free and open to the public, is sponsored by the College’s American Studies Department and the Center for Southwestern and Mexican Studies.
Nesset is author of Mr. Agreeable and Paradise Road (fiction), as well as Saint X, a book of poems, and The Stories of Raymond Carver, a nonfiction study. He also authored and edited two books of translations, Alphabet of the World: Selected Works by Eugenio Montejo, and Disappearances: Stories by Edmundo Paz Soldan (forthcoming, Calypso Editions). He was awarded the Drue Heinz literature prize in 2007 and has received a Pushcart Prize and grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. His stories, poems, translations, and essays have appeared in hundreds of journals, including The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, American Poetry Review, Gettysburg Review, Iowa Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, Agni, Witness, Crazyhorse, The Sun, and Prairie Schooner, among others. His short fictions have been widely anthologized, appearing in W. W. Norton’s Flash Fiction Forward, New Sudden Fiction, Sudden Fiction Latino, and elsewhere.
He is professor of English and creative writing at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania. He reads, lectures, and leads workshops internationally, promoting his books, speaking on topics in contemporary literature, American Indian fiction, the short story, flash and micro fiction, prose poetry, Raymond Carver, Latin American poetry, microrelatos, and literary translation.
His translations of works by Eugenio Montejo and Luisa Valenzuela have drawn much acclaim and his forthcoming book is a selection of micro tales in translation gathered from the work of Edmundo Paz Soldan, a well-known Bolivian writer.
Nesset serves summers as faculty at Black Forest Writing Seminars in Freiburg, Germany, and teaches regularly as writer-in-residence at the Chautauqua Literary Center in New York. He also plays and sings in the music groups Unkle John’s Band and Twisted Roots.
Nesset grew up in northern California, earned a bachelor’s degree at University of California Santa Cruz and a master’s degree and Ph.D. at University of California Santa Barbara. He has studied abroad and worked as a dishwasher, a tree planter, a telemarketer, a car parker, a caterer, a writing consultant, and a salesman selling wood stoves. When not writing, reading, rehearsing, or teaching, he mountain bikes, swims, and rollerblades, dividing his time between Arizona and Pennsylvania, with Ryan, the much-celebrated mini-Pomeranian dog.
Austin College is a leading national independent liberal arts college located north of Dallas in Sherman, Texas. Founded in 1849, making it the oldest institution of higher education in Texas operating under original charter and name, the College is related by covenant to the Presbyterian Church (USA). Recognized nationally for academic excellence in the areas of international education, pre-professional training, and leadership studies, Austin College is one of 40 schools profiled in Loren Pope’s influential book Colleges That Change Lives.