Beck Series

The Beck Series provides students the opportunity to hear, study with, and engage some of this country’s finest writers.

Beck Series Coordinator:
Margot Singer

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About the Beck Series

For over fifty years the Beck Series, funded by the Harriet Ewens Beck Endowment for English, has been a mainstay of creative writing studies at Denison University. The series provides students the opportunity to hear, study with, and engage some this country’s finest writers in the close quarters and pastoral setting of our hilltop campus in Granville, Ohio.

Here are just a few notable speakers from past years:

  • Eudora Welty — Pulitzer Prize winner for “The Optimist’s Daughter”
  • Alice Walker — Pulitzer Prize & National Book Award winner; author of “The Color Purple ”
  • Tom Stoppard — Playwright & Oscar-winning screenwriter for “Shakespeare in Love”
  • W.S. Merwin — Pulitzer Prize for Poetry winner & United States Poet Laureate
Beck Series guest, GLCA fiction award winner Lesley Nneka Arimah speaks
Beck Series guest, GLCA fiction award winner Lesley Nneka Arimah
Beck Series guest, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Philip Levine
Beck Series guest, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Philip Levine
Beck Series guests, prize-winning poets Maggie Glover '05 and Page Starzinger
Beck Series guests, prize-winning poets Maggie Glover '05 and Page Starzinger

Harriet Ewens Beck, class of 1910, developed a lifelong love of poetry after studying high school English with Willa Cather in Pittsburgh. Upon her passing, her husband Gordon C. Beck (class of 1906), arrived on campus in 1960 and announced to Paul Bennett of the English Department, “I want to establish an enduring monument to Harriet, something that will honor her interest in writing.” Beck pledged to fund the endowment and then, over a lunch of peanut butter crackers and chocolate chip cookies in the Student Union, the two men outlined the plans of what would become one of most vibrant and dynamic reading series on any campus in this country.

The Beck Series first visitor was Eudora Welty, whose four-day visit came in April of 1964. She met with faculty, visited classes, and conferenced with students about their manuscripts. That first visit set the tone and template that defines the Beck Series. Visitors to Denison’s campus continue to share their work in public readings, meet with creative writing classes and the campus community, and work with students in one-on-one manuscript consultations or lead workshops. 

The generous gift from the Beck family has brought to Denison twelve United States’ Poet Laureates and over twenty winners of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, including Derek Walcott, Louise Erdrich, Mark Strand, Aleksander Hemon, Steven Millhauser, and Edwidge Danticat, to name a few.

 

“The Beck Series has been one of Denison’s jewels, a virtual anthology of American writing since 1960. New, emerging, established, and downright famous writers in every literary genre, from short poems to long novels, political, lyrical, confessional — every literary stance has been represented by our visitors.”

David Baker, Thomas B. Fordham Chair of Creative Writing

Beck Series
Archives

2009 - 2010

Antonya Nelson
Antonya Nelson teaches at the University of Houston, where she holds the Cullen Chair in Creative Writing.
Aracelis Girmay
Aracelis Girmay, the winner of the 2009 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award for poetry, will read from her latest work, "Teeth" (Curbstone Press, 2007).
Don Waters
Don Waters has received numerous fellowships and honors for his writing, including the Pushcart Prize, the Silver Pen Award from the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame, and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award in fiction.
Kazim Ali
Kazim Ali teaches creative writing and literature at Oberlin College.
Moustafa Bayoumi
Moustafa Bayoumi is an associate professor of English at Brooklyn College, the City University of New York.
David Baker
David Baker is Professor of English at Denison University and holds the Thomas B. Fordham Chair of Creative Writing.
Steven Mailloux
Steven Mailloux is the Chancellor's Professor of Rhetoric at UC Irvine in the School of Humanities.
Jill Bialosky & Nancy Zafris
Jill Bialosky is a native of Cleveland and works as Senior Editor at W. W. Norton in New York City.

2008 - 2009

Allison Stine '00
Alison Stine is a graduate of Denison's class of '00. "Ohio Violence", her first book, winner of the 2008 Vassar Miller Prize, will be published by the University of North Texas Press.
Lee Martin
Lee Martin is the author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist "The Bright Forever"; a novel, "Quakertown"; a story collection, "The Least You Need to Know", and two memoirs, "From Our House" and "Turning Bones".
Ellen Bryant Voigt
Ellen Bryant Voigt is the author of several collections of poetry, including "Shadow of Heaven", a finalist for the National Book Award, and "Kyrie", a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Andy Mozina
Andy Mozina is the author of the short fiction collection "The Women Were Leaving the Men" which was the 2008 winner of the GLCA New Writers Award for Fiction, and a finalist for the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction.
Mark Halliday
Born in 1949, Mark Halliday earned his B.A. at Brown University in 1971, an M.A. in creative writing at Brown in 1976, and a Ph.D. in English Literature at Brandeis University in 1983.
V.V. Ganesananthan
Vasugi V. Ganeshananthan, a fiction writer and journalist, lives in New York.
Ander Monson
Ander Monson is the author of the novel "Other Electricities" and the poetry collection "Vacationland".
Dick Davis
Dick Davis was born in Portsmouth, England, in 1945, and educated at the universities of Cambridge (B.A. and M.A. in English Literature) and Manchester (PhD. in Medieval Persian Literature).

2007 - 2008

Meghan O'Rourke & Ted Genoways
Meghan O’Rourke was born in Brooklyn in 1976.
Kevin McIlvoy
Kevin McIlvoy teaches at New Mexico State University where he has been editor in chief of Puerto del Sol magazine for twenty-seven years.
Margot Singer
Margot Singer is the author of "The Pale of Settlement" (University of Georgia Press, 2007), winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction.
Jack Wilkins
Jack Wilkins is one of the world’s premier jazz guitarists and music educators.
Karen Alkalay-Gut
Poet, professor, and performer, Karen Alkalay-Gut has published over 20 books of poetry and has read her poetry in places as diverse as Oxford University, the Nuyorican Café in New York, the UN, the Library of Congress, the Kennedy Center, the Arab and Druze towns of Tarshiha and Mghrar, synagogues, churches, and Jerusalem night clubs and poetry centers.
Jay Hopler
Jay Hopler was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in1970 and has earned degrees from New York University, The Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
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