Events

An Evening with STEVEN PINKER and REBECCA GOLDSTEIN

Mind-Body Problems:
A Conversation About Science, Fiction and God

Wednesday, February 17th, 6:30 p.m.
Thompson Room,
Harvard Center for the Humanities, Barker Center

Steven Pinker is Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. Pinker is one of the world's leading authorities on language and the mind, and the the author of seven books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, Words and Rules, The Blank Slate, and The Stuff of Thought.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is a philosopher, scholar, and award-winning novelist. Her latest novel is 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction. Her books include the novels The Mind-Body Problem, Properties of Light, and Mazel, and nonfiction studies of Kurt Gödel and Baruch Spinoza. A recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1996, Goldstein has also received Guggenheim and Radcliffe fellowships and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Rebecca Goldstein will discuss her new book, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction:

Brookline Booksmith, January 14th
Newtonville Book Store, January 17th
Harvard Bookstore, February 2nd
Porter Square Books, February

DISCOVERY EVENING, Tuesday, March 2nd

PEN New England invites you to a celebration of new writers at our
31st Annual DISCOVERY EVENING

Tuesday, March 2, 2010 from 7:00 to 8:30 p.m.

RICHARD HOFFMAN introduces writer ANTHONY D'ARIES
PETER COVINO introduces poet RYAN FLAHERTY
KATE SNODGRASS introduces playwright MASHA OBOLENSKY

The Amphitheatre
Lesley University, Cambridge
University Hall, 1815 Massachusetts Avenue
(Parking available in lot behind University Hall)

Richard Hoffman's celebrated memoir Half the House was awarded the Boston Athenaeum Readers' Prize in 1996. He is the author of two collections of poems, Without Paradise, and Gold Star Road, winner of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and The New England Poetry Club's Sheila Motton Award for best book of poetry published in the previous two years. His new collection of short fiction, Interference and Other Stories, was published in 2009. Twice named a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in fiction, he is currently one of The Boston Foundation's Brother Thomas Fellows. He is a Writer-in-Residence in the Department of Writing, Literature and Publishing at Emerson College, and the Chair of PEN New England.

Prize-winning poet, translator, and essayist Peter Covino is Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Rhode Island. He won the 2007 PEN America/Osterweil Award for emerging poets and is the author of Cut Off the Ears of Winter, and the chapbook Straight Boyfriend, winner of the Frank O'Hara Poetry Prize. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Cimarron Review, Colorado Review, Gulf Coast, The Yale Review, and Quarterly West, among others. A founding editor of Barrow Street, he is currently editing Essays on Italian American Literature and Culture for Bordighera Press.

Kate Snodgrass is the Artistic Director of both the Elliot Norton Award-winning Boston Theater Marathon and Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott's Boston Playwrights' Theatre. She is the author of the Actors' Theatre of Louisville's Heideman Award-winning play Haiku, and she has won two "Best New Play" IRNE Awards (Observatory, 1999, and The Glider, 2004, also nominated for the American Theatre Critics Association's Steinberg Award). Acknowledged by StageSource in 2001 as a "Theatre Hero," Kate is a former National Chair of Playwriting at the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival and a Playwriting Fellow with the Huntington Theatre Company. She is a member of the A.E.A, A.F.T.R.A., and The Dramatists' Guild, and has taught at numerous universities in the area.

Reception to follow...

March 4th with Jane Kamensky & Jill Lepore

PEN New England cordially invites
you to join a conversation with
Christopher Lydon
&
JANE KAMENSKY and JILL LEPORE
co-authors of Blindspot

Thursday, March 4th 2010
Upstairs on the Square
5:00 - 6:00 Wine Hour
6:00 - 6:45 Reading and Conversation

"A portrait of pre-Revolutionary Boston that is true to the spirit of the time while inventing a couple of romantic, witty, down-on-their-luck, larger-than-life characters struggling to stay afloat in tumultuous times."
-- The Wall Street Journal on Blindspot

Jane Kamensky is the Harry S. Truman Professor of American Civilization and Chair of the Department of History at Brandeis University. Kamensky is the author of The Exchange Artist: A Tale of High-Flying Speculation and America's First Banking Collapse, a finalist for the 2009 George Washington Book Prize. Her other publications include Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England; and The Colonial Mosaic: American Women, 1600-1760.

Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and chair of Harvard's History and Literature Program. She is a staff writer at The New Yorker and author of New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History and winner of the New York City Book Prize.

This series is co-chaired by Christopher Lydon, Erica Funkhouser, and Amy Macdonald. We are pleased to collaborate with Upstairs on the Square and Porter Square Books to produce the PEN New England Monthly Reading Series, now in its seventh year.