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Northern Illinois University

NIU Office of Public Affairs


News Release

Contact: Tom Parisi, NIU Public Affairs
(815) 753-363

August 31, 2004

NIU writing stars invited to read works
at Midwest Literary Festival

DeKalb, Ill.—Three rising literary talents at Northern Illinois University have been invited to participate in the upcoming Midwest Literary Festival in Aurora.

Poet Amy Newman, nonfiction writer Joe Bonomo and novelist Keith Gandal will read from their works at 11 a.m. Saturday, Sept. 11 in Room A of the Meyer Ballroom at North Island Center. The three writers, all faculty members in the NIU Department of English, also will hold a panel discussion on the intersection of imagination and reality in the art of writing.

The Midwest Literary Festival (www.midwestliteraryfestival.com) showcases some of the country’s best and brightest authors with an aim toward promoting reading, writing, the book arts and the region’s literary heritage.

Amy Newman will read from “fall,” her collection of poems set to be released in September through Wesleyan University Press. The book explores the 72 definitions of the title word, with each definition engendering its own poem and serving as a selection title. The poems span a narrative drama—from the creation of the world and the subsequent exile of its first inhabitants, through the downward movement of the human body in its surrender to illness, to the beauty in the descent of spent foliage in autumn.

The manuscript-in-progress won Newman a MacDowell Colony Fellowship and a 2003 Artists Fellowship from the Illinois Arts Council. Newman also is author of “Order, or Disorder” (1995), which received the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Prize, and Camera Lyrica (1999), which received the Beatrice Hawley Award.

Joe Bonomo will read from a manuscript in progress titled, “Gone.” The book explores memory through a collection of essays on personal reminiscences, ranging from growing up Catholic and suburban, to Midwestern train tracks, to the seamy violence of cities. The essays consider why some memories linger in us and others do not and why we remember at all.

Bonomo’s essays, poems and book reviews have appeared in numerous literary journals and magazines, including River Teeth, The Ohio Review, Quarter after Eight and The Gettysburg Review. He is the recipient of a 2004 Fellowship Finalist Award in Prose and a 1998 Fellowship in Poetry from the Illinois Arts Council. Bonomo is currently writing “Sweat: The Life and Times of The Fleshtones, America's Garage Band,” an authorized biography of the New York City cult rock and roll band.

Keith Gandal will read from his heralded work of fiction, “Cleveland Anonymous” (North Atlantic Books, 2002). The book, a darkly comedic novel, is about a successful environmental lawyer who is haunted by memories of a troubled childhood and the troubles of the Lake Erie city during the '60s and early '70s. Author Dan O’Brien recommends the work, calling it “an unlikely combination of the clean, crisp prose of Ernest Hemingway and the playful magic of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.”

Gandal also is the author of an academic book, “The Virtues of the Vicious” (Oxford, UP, 1997). He is working on a second scholarly book, “Fictions of Poverty,” about our current myths and fictions about the poor. He is also at work on a second novel, “Browerly School for Girls: Private,” a mystery set in the contemporary Gothic milieu of a private girls’ school in California. For the last three summers, Gandal has been the director of the Fulbright American Studies Institute at NIU, bringing foreign scholars to campus to study contemporary American literature.

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