Professionally Published Writers

Speaker: Mark Arsenault
Date: Sunday, July 20, 2008
Time: 5 - 6:30PM
Location: TBA

Mark Arsenault is a mystery author and a general assignment reporter for The Providence Journal in Rhode Island. He has drawn on 18 years in journalism for inspiration in each of his novels. His third book, the thriller Gravewriter, (2006, St. Martin’s Press) is the first in a new series to be set in Providence, Rhode Island. To create the characters and the settings, Arsenault drew from his 50 prison interviews with one of the most feared killers in the state’s history. His first book, Spiked, (2003, Poisoned Pen Press) was a finalist for the Shamus Award for Best First Mystery. His follow-up novel, Speak Ill of the Living, (2005, Poisoned Pen Press) was inspired by two years of jailhouse interviews inside “Supermax,” Rhode Island's most secure prison. Since 1998, Mark has been working at The Providence Journal covering politics and general news. His prison interviews became a highly controversial newspaper series in 2004, entitled “Into Another World.” He also spent one year writing about the aftermath of the 2003 Rhode Island nightclub fire that killed 100 people.

Speaker: Catherine Watson
Date: Monday, July 21, 2008
Time: 5 - 6:30PM
Location: TBA

Catherine Watson is an award-winning writer, photographer and teacher. The former travel editor of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, she is the author of two collections of travel essays, the new Home on the Road—Further Dispatches from the Ends of the Earth (Syren, 2007), and Roads Less Traveled—Dispatches from the Ends of the Earth (Syren, 2005), which Booklist called “travel reading at its best.” Her new book has just been named a finalist in the memoir category of the Minnesota Book Awards.

Speaker:Wayne Koestenbaum
Date: Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Time: 5-6:30 PM
Location: TBA

Wayne Koestenbaum has published five books of non-fiction prose: Andy Warhol; Cleavage: Essays on Sex, Stars and Aesthetics; Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon; The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire; and Double Talk: The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration.  He has also published a novel, Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes, and five books of poetry: Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films, Model Homes, The Milk of Inquiry, Rhapsodies of a Repeat Offender, and Ode to Anna Moffo and Other Poems.  He wrote the libretto for the opera Jackie O (music by Michael Daugherty). The Queen’s Throat was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award; Koestenbaum won a Whiting Writer’s Award in 1994.  He is a Professor of English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He received a B.A. in English from Harvard, an M.A. in Creative Writing from John Hopkins, and a Ph.D. in English from Princeton.