Reading: Sterling Watson, Helen Pruitt Wallace, Major Jackson

Eckerd College Writers’ Conference: Writers in Paradise presents an evening reading with Sterling Watson, Helen Pruitt Wallace and Major Jackson.
Reading will be followed by book sale and author signings. This event is free and open to the public. Visit http://www.writersinparadise.com for more information.

Sterling Watson is the author of seven novels: Fighting in the Shade; Sweet Dream Baby; Deadly Sweet; Blind Tongues; The Calling; Weep No More, My Brother; and Suitcase City. Dennis Lehane described Fighting in the Shade as “a brilliant, fearless look at the savage rites of passage that exist in the fraternity of American sports, a book as gripping and unforgettable as any in recent memory.” Sterling is the recipient of three Florida Fine Arts Council Awards for Fiction Writing. His short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Prairie Schooner; The Georgia Review; The Los Angeles Times Book Review; Gulfstream Magazine; The Michigan Quarterly Review; The Chattahoochee Review; and The Southern Review. He has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. The Peter Meinke Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at Eckerd College, he co-directed the Writers in Paradise Conference with Dennis Lehane for 11 years. He now teaches in the Solstice MFA Program at Pine Manor College in Boston. His seventh novel, Suitcase City, was published by Akashic Books in 2015. Of Suitcase City, Tom Franklin said, “If this taut literary crime novel doesn’t center Sterling Watson on the map, we should change the maps.”

Helen Pruitt Wallace serves as the Poet Laureate of St. Petersburg, and the host of the Dali Poetry Series at the Dali museum. Her first collection of poems, Shimming the Glass House (published by Ashland Poetry Press) won the Richard Snyder Prize for Poetry and a bronze Florida Book Award, and a chapbook, Pink Streets, was published fall 2016 by Yellow Jacket Press. She served as co-editor of the anthology Isle of Flowers published by Anhinga Press, and individual poems have been published in several journals and anthologies. She’s received a McKay Shaw Academy of American Poets Award, The dA Center for the Arts Poetry Award, a residency fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She earned her Ph.D. in English/Creative Writing from Florida State University, and has taught poetry and nonfiction at Eckerd College.

Major Jackson is the author of four collections of poetry, including Roll Deep (Norton: 2015), which won the 2016 Vermont Book Award and was hailed in the New York Times Book Review as “a remixed odyssey.” His other volumes include Holding Company (Norton: 2010), Hoops (Norton: 2006), and Leaving Saturn (University of Georgia: 2002), which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. Jackson has published poems and essays in American Poetry Review, Callaloo, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Tin House, and in several volumes of Best American Poetry. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, Pew Fellowships in the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, among other honors. Jackson has taught as visiting faculty at Adelphia University, New York University, Columbia University, University of Massachusetts-Lowell as the Jack Kerouac Writer in Residence and the Sidney Harman Writer in-Residence at Baruch College. He is the Richard A. Dennis Green & Gold Professor at the University of Vermont. He serves as the Poetry Editor of The Harvard Review.