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The Kelly Writers House Fellows Program - John Edgar WidemanApril 24-25, 2000 |
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John
Edgar Wideman reading - A digital recording
of the April
24, 2000 event where Wideman read from his work. See the Writers House calendar entry for more about this event.
John
Edgar
Wideman interview/conversation - A recording of the
April 25, 2000 audiocast of the interview and conversation with John
Edgar Wideman, moderated by Lorene Cary and Al
Filreis, Faculty Director of the Kelly Writers
House. See the Writers House calendar entry for more about this event.
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John Edgar Wideman is the only person to have won the PEN/Faulkner Award
twice -- in 1984 for Sent For You Yesterday and in 1990 for
Philadelphia Fire. His nonfiction book about his brother's
conviction for murder, Brothers and Keepers, received a National
Book Critics Circle Nomination. In the novel Two Cities (1998), a
love story, Wideman explores the survival of an endangered black urban
community. In Philadelphia Fire the settings include West
Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania of the 1960s, 70s, and
80s--the troubled social, political, academic landscape charred by the
bombing of the Afrocentric MOVE house in 1985. Wideman is a graduate of
Penn (1963), where he was an All-Big Five, All-Ivy basketball star, and
earned both the Rhodes and the Thouron Awards for graduate study. After
Oxford, he joined the faculty; he taught English and writing at Penn until
1972. "Wideman's writing," one critic has noted, "strides along in
mesmerizing, gliding stretches."
This visit was co-sponsored by Art Sanctuary.
Writers House Fellows Program | Writers House Webcast Archive
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