Raymond Carver Reading Series: Deb Olin Unferth

Deb Olin Unferth is the author of six books of fiction and nonfiction, including, most recently, the novel Barn 8 (Graywolf, March 2020). Her writing has appeared in Harper’s, The Paris Review, Granta, Vice, Tin House, NOON, the New York Times, and McSweeney’s. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and three Pushcart Prizes, she grew up in Chicago and received an M.F.A. from Syracuse University. She is now an associate professor of creative writing at the University of Texas at Austin, where she teaches for the Michener Center for Writers and the New Writers Project.

An advocate of prison reform, Unferth founded and runs the Pen City Writers, a creative-writing certificate program at a maximum security prison in southern Texas. For this work she won the 2017 Texas Governor’s Criminal Justice Service Award and the 2017 American Short Fiction Community Star Award.

The Raymond Carver Reading Series features twelve to fourteen prominent writers yearly as part of a large undergraduate class taught by TAs from the Creative Writing Program. The readings have an extended question-and-answer session along with a reading.

Normally these readings take place in Gifford Auditorium on Syracuse University’s main campus and are open to the public, but because of the global-health situation the Fall 2020 Reading Series will be conducted virtually via the videoconferencing platform Zoom. If you are interested in a Zoom invitation to this reading, please contact Sarah Harwell at scharwel@syr.edu.

(Photo by Nick Berard)

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