The Cornell Department of English Creative Writing Program launches the Fall 2016 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series on Thursday, September 1, 4:30pm, in Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium, Klarman Hall, with a celebration of the life and work of Goldwin Smith Professor of English Literature Emeritus James McConkey on the occasion of his 95th birthday.

James McConkey has been one of the most important and outstanding members of the literary and creative writing community at Cornell. After arriving in Ithaca in 1956, he became instrumentally involved with the new creative writing program and Epoch magazine, as well as the English department at large where he taught courses in modern fiction and nonfiction.

In 1965, McConkey founded the Cornell Council of the Arts. In the late 1970s, he organized one of the most memorable cultural events in Cornell history, the Chekhov Festival, bringing in a succession of prominent writers including Eudora Welty, John Cheever, Denise Levertov, and Walker Percy, to speak about the Russian author, give readings from their own work, and meet with students and faculty. Few other events have matched that program for its impact on students and the larger community.

McConkey has been known as one of the finest prose stylists of our era. His autobiographical essays, collected in volumes such as The Night Stand, Crossroads, and Court of Memory, are powerful and profound meditations on his own life and the culture of our times. With unflinching honesty and incisive precision, he has probed his own experience, contemporary history, and the ongoing struggle to understand our lives and the moral exigencies of art and the craft of writing. In the 1970s and 1980s McConkey published essay after essay in The New Yorker, establishing a national reputation for the depth and accessibility of his memoirs.

In celebration of his 95th birthday, his long career and commitment to the Creative Writing Program and English Department, and countless other contributions to our literary community, three of McConkey's award-winning former students will read from their own works in his honor: Diane Ackerman, Gilbert Allen, and A. Manette Ansay.

This event is free and open to the public.

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