Rosellen Brown, fiction

March 11 at 8:00 pm in the Silver Eagle B&C

Rosellen Brown's most recent novel is Half a Heart (Picador) and her 1974 story collection Street Games was republished in 2001 by Norton. She has also written two books of poetry. Her stories have appeared in O. Henry Prize Stories, Best American Short Stories, and the Pushcart Prize anthologies. Brown has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Bunting Institute, the Howard Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Chicago and teaches in the M.F.A. Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

B.H. (Pete) Fairchild

April 10 at 8:00 pm in the Golden Eagle (3rd suite)

B.H. Fairchild was born in Houston, Texas and grew up there and in small towns in west Texas, Oklahoma, and southwest Kansas. He attended the University of Tulsa and University of Kansas, working part-time as movie usher, technical writer for a nitroglycerin plant, and English tutor to the Kansas basketball team. The Arrival of the Future was his first full-length book of poems, originally published by Swallow’s Tale Press in 1985 and republished in a new edition by Alice James Books in 2000. His third book, The Art of the Lathe, was a Finalist for the National Book Award and also received the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the William Carlos Williams Award, the PEN West Poetry Award, the California Book Award, the Natalie Ornish Award from the Texas Institute of Letters, and an Honorable Mention for the Poet’s Prize. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Paris Review, Hudson Review, Southern Review, Poetry, Yale Review, Sewanee Review, and many other journals and anthologies, including The Best American Poems of 2000. He has been the recipient of fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Lannan Foundation and is the author of Such Holy Song, a scholarly study of William Blake. In 2001 the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the Arthur Rense Poetry Prize for “consistent excellence over a long career.” Fairchild’s fourth book of poems, Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest, appeared from W.W. Norton in 2003 and received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Gold Medal in Poetry from the California Book Awards, the Texas Institute of Letters Poetry Award, and the Bobbitt Award from the Library of Congress, given in behalf of the nation for “the most distinguished book of poems published in the previous two years.” In 2005, a revised edition of his second book, Local Knowledge, was published by Norton, and Fairchild was honored with the Aiken/Taylor Modern Poetry Award from The Sewanee Review for the body of his work.