ORANGE, Calif. (March 31, 2016) FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE –
Chapman University is once again bringing prominent authors together for the Literary Pub(lishing) Crawl to talk, sign their books and advise hopeful writers on the winding road to publication success. This free event is on Tuesday April 12, 2016 at 3:00 p.m. and will be held at Chapman University in Beckman Hall 404. Chapman is located at One University Drive, Orange Calif. Organized by the Department of English, Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences and the Leatherby Libraries, the Pub(lishing) Crawl is an opportunity that allows attendees a chance to get face-to-face with authors and sit in on a panel discussion moderated by
Pico Iyer will speak at the annual Pub(lishing) Crawl.
organizer, author and Chapman professor James Blaylock. This year’s lineup of writers
Pico Iyer
,
Janna Levin
,
Ryan Gattis’01
and
Gordon McAlpine
bring science, travel and fiction together for a powerful range of genre representation.
“We’ve never had a Pub Crawl in the past with such an illustrious, brilliant, wide-ranging lineup of writers,” said Blaylock. “All four of the speakers are related to Chapman University — all of them teachers in one way or another — and each is a remarkably original writer.”
Chapman alumnus, writer and educator
Ryan Gattis’01
recently authored the book, “All Involved: A Novel of the 1992 L.A. Riots,” told from the perspectives of gang members, firefighters, nurses and other L.A. citizens who lived through it. Gattis graduated from Chapman with a degree in literature and, after earning his MFA in creative writing in England, he returned to teach at Chapman, during which he researched his novel. “All Involved” is grounded in two and a half years of research, has won the American Library Association’s Alex Award and the Lire Award for Noir of the Year in France. Set to be translated into 11 languages, it has been called “a high-octane speedball of a read” by the New York Times, and its film rights have been acquired by HBO. Gattis lives and writes in Los Angeles, where he is a member of the street art crew UGLARworks and a founding board member of 1888, a Southern California literary arts non-profit. “All Involved is part social commentary, part character study, and it absolutely captures the gritty, desperate realities of gang culture,” said Blaylock.
Janna Levin
, a Barnard College of Columbia University professor of physics and astronomy and a Chapman Chancellor’s Fellow, is the author of “How the Universe Got Its Spots,” “A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines” and “Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space,” among others. She is director of sciences at Pioneer Works, a center for arts and sciences in Brooklyn and was recently named a Guggenheim fellow. Levin has contributed to an understanding of black holes, the cosmology of extra dimensions, and gravitational waves in the shape of spacetime.
Pico Iyer
, author of “The Art of Stillness,” is a Time magazine essayist, New York Times contributor and Chapman Presidential Fellow who has published numerous books on his world-wide travels, the concept of where home is and most recently, the joy one finds in just staying put and unplugging. When he isn’t peering into the far corners of the planet or secluding himself in a California Benedictine monastery, he lives in rural Japan with his longtime sweetheart.
Gordon McAlpine
is the author of a number of books, the most recent being the Edgar Award-nominated “Woman with a Blue Pencil.” Joyce Carol Oates called it “a book that Kafka, Borges and Nabokov, as well as Dashiell Hammett, would have appreciated.” He is also the author of “Hammett Unwritten,” “The Way of Baseball,” “Finding Stillness at 95 MPH,” “Joy in Mudville,” the young adult trilogy “The Misadventures of Edgar and Allan Poe,” and others. He has chaired the MFA program at Chapman University and has taught fiction writing classes at UCLA and UC Irvine.
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www.chapman.edu
.
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###
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Chapman University
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