Amy Hempel and Lydia Davis to Headline Benefit for Word Street
PITTSFIELD - Nationally-acclaimed authors Amy Hempel and Lydia Davis will headline Word Street's third annual benefit on Thursday, April 17. The benefit will take place at Barrington Stage Company, 30 Union Street, Pittsfield, and begin at 7PM.Ms. Hempel and Ms. Davis will be reading from their published work and recent works-in-progress. Word Street will also present a short film on its programming by photographer and multi-media artist Kristen Schueler, feature live readings by several of the young writers of Word Street, and a short ceremony honoring Word Street's Teachers of the Month and its main philanthropic supporter, Mrs. Norma Ruffer. The evening's festivities will be hosted by Kate Merrigan and Cynthia Saunders.
Amy Hempel was born in Chicago, Illinois. She is well known for her works in fiction and non-fiction. In 1985, she published her first story collection, "Reason to Live", which won the Commonwealth Club of California Silver Medal. Amy is also the author of "At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom" and "Tumble Home", and is the coeditor of the anthology, Unleashed: Poems by Writer's Dogs. Amy's stories have appeared in Vanity Fair, Harper's, The Quarterly, The Yale Review and several anthologies, including The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. She also works as a contributing editor to Bomb Magazine. Amy has won several prestigious literary awards for her work, including the Hobson Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Over the years, she has served as a judge for the National Book Award, The PEN-Revson Award, The PEN-Hemingway Award, and the Mary McCarthy Prize among others. Amy has also taught at a number of colleges and universities across the country, including New York University, Saint Mary's College, and the University of Missouri. She is currently a faculty member in the graduate writing programs of Bennington College in Vermont and The New School University in New York City.
Lydia Davis was born in Northampton, raised in New York City, and resides in upstate New York. Her books include the collections "Break it Down", "Samuel Johnson Is Indignant", a "Village Voice" favorite, "Almost No Memory", a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year, and the novel The End of the Story. She is the recipient of the Whiting Writer's Award (1988), the French-American Foundation Translation Award (1992), a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lannan Literary Award, was a finalist for the PEN-Hemingway Foundation Award for Fiction, and was honored for her translation work with the French Insigna of the Order of Arts and Letters.The acclaimed translator of Swann’s Way, by Marcel Proust, and recipient of a 2003 MacArthur Fellowship, Davis is on leave from SUNY Albany, where she is also a Fellow of the New York State Writers Institute. Her latest collection of short stories, Varieties of Disturbance, was published as a paperback original by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in May 2007 and was nominated for the National Book Award.
Tickets to the event are $20 and are available in person at Word Street, 163 North Street, Pittsfield, Monday-Thursday 3:30-5:30PM, by phone, 413-997-3307, or by visiting wordstreet.org. All proceeds will go directly to Word Street's free programming for area youth. This is the third Word Street benefit since it opened in 2004. Past readers have included Dave Eggers, Jim Shepard, and Lawrence Raab.
Word Street is an educational nonprofit and drop-in tutoring and literary arts center that offers free services to area youth 8-18. The project is possible through the fiscal guidance and support of the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation of Great Barrington, the Berkshire Bank Foundation, and the generosity of individuals.
