Author Ben Lerner to Speak on the Arts in the Age of Google Searches, Pharmaceuticals, and the Global War on Terror

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

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., November 16, 2012—Benjamin S. Lerner, award-winning poet, essayist, novelist, and critic, will visit Williams College on Thursday, Dec. 6, for a reading of his best-selling novel, Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), followed by a Q&A moderated by Associate Professor of Romance Languages Soledad Fox. The event will take place at 6:30 p.m. in Griffin Hall, Room 3, and is free and open to the public.

Leaving the Atocha Station was hailed by James Wood of The New Yorker as “A first novel about poetry and imposture in Spain.” It recounts the adventures of American poet Adam Gordon in Madrid, and is an autobiographical work based on the year Lerner spent as a Fulbright Scholar in Spain. The novel was awarded “The Believer” Book Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award.

Lerner teaches in the English department at Brooklyn College and is poetry editor of Critical Quarterly. His collection of poems, Angle of Yaw, was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Northern California Book Awards (2006). Lerner’s other honors include the Hayden Carruth Award (2003), Howard Foundation Fellowship (2010), and Preis der Stadt Münster für Internationale Poesie (2011). He received a B.A. in political theory and an M.F.A in creative writing from Brown University.

To learn more about the author, please see:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/06/this-week-in-fiction-ben-lerner.html

www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jul/12/leaving-atocha-station-ben-lerner-review

The event is sponsored by the Departments of English and Romance Languages and the Center for Foreign Languages, Literatures, and Cultures.

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Published November 16, 2012