ARTS AND HUMANITIES
Celebrating 105 years of creative writing
Cornell's current Creative Writing Program faculty, pictured in Goldwin Smith Hall's Pale Fire Lounge, includes, left to right: Helena Mara Viramontes, Stephanie Vaughn, Phyllis Janowitz, Kenneth A. McClane Jr., Michael Koch, Alice Fulton, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, John Robert Lennon, Ernesto Quionez and Maureen McCoy.
Cornell writers -- both famous and lesser-known -- are in the limelight throughout 2009, with "The Centennial Celebration of Creative Writing at Cornell," a yearlong series of events celebrating the work of alumni and faculty writers.
Cornell first offered creative writing courses in 1905 as part of the English department curriculum. Since then, the university has counted many literary greats among its faculty and former students, including E.B. White, Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., A.R. Ammons, Vladimir Nabokov, Lorrie Moore, Robert Morgan, Susan Choi, Pulitzer Prize winners Junot Díaz and Alison Lurie, and Nobel laureates Toni Morrison and Pearl S. Buck. (For a complete list, see http://www.writers.cornell.edu.)
Graduate students in the program are nurtured as artists, and first-year M.F.A. students receive a tuition waiver and a stipend for their work on Cornell's 62-year-old literary magazine, Epoch.
"Most of them stay on as readers for us after they get their degrees," said Epoch editor Michael Koch.
Fiction and poetry first appearing in Epoch has been picked up for inclusion in major anthologies, and some short stories have also won O. Henry awards.
"The program is just getting stronger and stronger, in part because Epoch is doing phenomenal work," said Creative Writing Program Director Helena María Viramontes.
Noted writers among Cornell faculty and former students include (from left) Toni Morrison, Junot Diaz, Archie Ammons, Melissa Bank, Robert Morgan and Alison Lurie.
Fiction writer Díaz, M.F.A. '95, is one of the most recent of the program's literary success stories; he paid a two-day visit to campus in February to kick off the celebration. Díaz received the Cornell Council for the Arts' Eissner Artist of the Year Award Feb. 19, delivered a solo reading at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art and participated in a Centennial Reading in Rockefeller Hall with two creative writing alumnae: Melissa Bank ("The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing") and Julie Schumacher ("Black Box," "An Explanation for Chaos"). Díaz, Bank and Schumacher also signed books and met with students and faculty.
Díaz wrote most of his first collection of short stories ("Drown," published in 1996) while in the Creative Writing Program at Cornell. He also was part of a student effort to improve Latino studies at Cornell in the mid-1990s.
The Dominican-American author won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction for his debut novel, "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao."
"This is not just a writing program that develops M.F.A.s," Viramontes said. "This is a writing program that nurtures incredible talent -- people who engage in the social sciences and engage in politics."
The Centennial Readings are a continuation of a program-sponsored reading series, offered each semester and supported by a gift from two anonymous alumni donors. The readings "have given us the opportunity to bring in these huge names," Viramontes said. "They meet with undergraduate students, and they really enrich and engage and create this ambience around them."
All readings in 2009 will feature accomplished alumni writers. The second Centennial Reading,
on Feb. 26, welcomed back to campus fiction writer Helen Schulman and poets Emily Rosko and Lisa Steinman.
The next such event is on April 16 in Goldwin Smith Hall's Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, with poet Crystal Williams and fiction writers Stewart O'Nan and A. Manette Ansay.
Other events in the celebration include two community readings by more than 40 local writers, March 26 and Oct. 22 at the State Theatre in downtown Ithaca; and a publication party on campus April 2 for new books by faculty members J. Robert Lennon, Kenneth McClane, Jonathan Monroe and Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon. All events will be free and open to the public.
Current faculty members in English and creative writing are closely involved in the centennial events. Molly Hite is offering her course on "The Great American Cornell Novel" this spring, featuring many of the authors mentioned here; and a March 4 "Cornell Scholars on Cornell Writers" panel discussion included Hite's presentation on Thomas Pynchon. That event also offered talks by Robert Gilbert on the work of A.R. Ammons and his influence on Cornell English faculty members Alice Fulton and Kenneth McClane, and Mary Pat Brady on Latin American writers Manuel Muñoz (M.F.A. '98) and Loida Maritza Perez.
Muñoz, who won the prestigious Whiting Prize in 2008, gives no small credit for his development as a writer to Cornell and to Viramontes.
After graduation from Harvard University, "I wound up at Cornell and … the woman I now consider my literary godmother stepped in and helped me shape what has become my work. Helena María Viramontes, above all others, has been the single most important person in my writing life, and I count myself lucky that her presence at Cornell kept me confident and calm. … You'll have to come to a reading to hear how she phoned my mom (¡!) after I dragged on about accepting the offer to attend Cornell in the first place."
The celebration will not be a strictly local one. Cornell authors will also be featured on Public Radio International's "Selected Shorts" this spring, with their work read by stage actors.