Authors Peter Cole and Adina Hoffman to Present Book "Sacred Trash"

Media contact: Noelle Lemoine, communications assistant; tele: (413) 597-4277; email: [email protected]

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., September 30, 2013—Authors Peter Cole and Adina Hoffman will present a lecture at Williams College on their book Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 10. The presentation will take place in Griffin Hall, room 3. The event is free and open to the public. A book signing will follow.

Sacred Trash is a nonfiction book about the recovery from a Cairo geniza, a repository for worn-out texts, of some of the most vital Hebrew manuscripts ever discovered. Published in 2011, the book was awarded the American Library Association’s Brody Medal for the Jewish Book of the Year.

Cole and Hoffman are a husband and wife team. Cole is a renowned poet and translator. He was a MacArthur “Genius” Award Recipient in 2007, a Guggenheim Fellow in 2002, and has won the National Jewish Book Award in Poetry. He has taught at Yale University, Wesleyan University, and Middlebury College. He is one of the founders and editors of Ibis Editions, a press that publishes the literature of the Levant. Cole attended Williams College and Hampshire College.

Hoffman is an author, biographer, and film critic. Her essays and other works have appeared in publications such as the Nation, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, New York Newsday, and on the World Service of the BBC. She has written books about the Middle East and its people and was a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow and winner of this year’s Windham-Campbell Literature Prize. She has taught at Yale University and New York University. She received her B.A. from Wesleyan University in 1989.

The event is sponsored by the Program in Jewish Studies, the Bronfman Fund and the Wiener Lecture Fund.

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