CHESTERTOWN, MD—The Rose O’Neill Literary House at Washington College presents “An Evening with Ander Monson,” Tuesday, November 4 at 4:30 p.m.  Part of the Living Writers Series “Poets Writing the Lyrical Essay,” Monson’s talk and reading will take place at the Literary House, 407 Washington Avenue, and is free and open to the public.

Monson is a professor of nonfiction in the University of Arizona’s creative writing program and editor of the online literary journal DIAGRAM, which he founded in 2000. He has published five books, most recently Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir (Graywolf Press, 2010), which was named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism,and The Available World (Sarabande Books, 2010). His newest work, Letter to a Future Lover, due out from Graywolf Press in February 2015, consists of more than 77 essays on seemingly random things he has found while exploring libraries—from a human hair to a handwritten inscription in a book—and the conversations he heard around him.  

Monson has been published in many magazines and journals, including Best American Essays and The New York Times. He was a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award in Fiction, and is a 2010-2011 recipient of Brown University’s Howard Foundation Fellowship for fiction. In addition to his essays and books, Monson also has written such “paraphernalia” as chapbooks, a website, and a decoder wheel. 

Reviewing Vanishing Point, Not a Memoir for The New York Times, author David Shields wrote that Monson “turns the banality of nonfiction inside out and thereby makes nonfiction a staging area to investigate claims of fact and truth, an extremely rich theater for exploring the most serious ontological questions.” 

For more information about Ander Monson, or to read some of his essays, visit his website http://otherelectricities.com/.

– Kaitlyn Fowler ’17