Poetry-in-the-Round hosts acclaimed fiction writer Laura van den Berg on Tuesday, October 5 at 7 p.m. ET in a free online event.

Laura van den Berg's most recent book is the widely praised short story collection I Hold a Wolf by the Ears (FSG, 2020), which NPR called "exquisite." Other books include the novel The Third Hotel (FSG, 2018), named a Best Book of 2018 by The Boston Globe, Huffington Post, Electric Literature, and Lit Hub, and two other collections of stories, The Isle of Youth (FSG, 2013), and What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us (Dzanc Books, 2009), as well as the novel Find Me (FSG, 2015).

The New York Times says of I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, "The stylish, surreal stories in van den Berg's new collection, laced with edgy comedy, offer portraits of women in despair." The Los Angeles Times says: "an ecosystem of weird and stirring places you'll want to revisit, reconsider, maybe even take shelter in . . . sneakily brilliant."

In addition to 2021 Guggenheim fellowship, van den Berg's honors include the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, the Bard Fiction Prize, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, an O. Henry Award, and the Jeannette Haien Ballard Writer’s Prize. The Isle of Youth was named a "Best Book of 2013" by over a dozen outlets, including NPR, The Boston Globe, and O, The Oprah Magazine. Find Me was selected as a "Best Book of 2015" by NPR, Time Out New York, and BuzzFeed. Her stories have appeared in many top magazines, including The Kenyon Review, American Short Fiction, Ploughshares, and One Story, and have been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Mystery Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. Her criticism and essays have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, O, The Oprah Magazine, BOMB Magazine, and Vogue.com.

She has recently taught creative writing in the M.F.A. Program at Columbia University, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. She is a Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Fiction at Harvard University and also teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

The event is free and open to the public. All are welcome. Register here. 

About the Series:
Poetry-in-the-Round has brought some of the best contemporary writers from around the world to Seton Hall University for the past three decades. Some of those visitors have included Jennifer Egan, Susan Choi, Dinaw Mengestu, Ben Lerner, Christine Schutt, Heidi Julavits, Ben Marcus, Jenny Offill, Gary Shteyngart, Kaitlyn Greenidge, Karen Russell, Alexandra Kleeman, Helen Phillips, Major Jackson, Deborah Eisenberg, Susan Orlean, Jonathan Franzen, Joyce Carol Oates, Salman Rushdie, Russell Banks, C.K. Williams, Nadine Gordimer, Jamaica Kincaid, John Ashbery, Adrienne Rich, and many others. The series has worked to bring established and up-and-coming new writers to the attention of Seton Hall students and the community.

Categories: Arts and Culture