Frani O’Toole Co Editor in Chief Beginning on Thursday, Latin will welcome four guest writers—Ishmael Beah, Laura Van Prooyen, Kevin Brockmeier, and Reginald Gibbons—as part of the LitFest programming. These writers will be share their work, discuss craft, and visit classrooms on days scheduled throughout the week. Below are excerpts from their respective biographies: Thursday, February 5th from 6:45—9: Ishmael Beah is the bestselling author of A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, a memoir of his childhood in Sierra Leone. Time ranked the A Long Way Gone as the third best Nonfiction book of 2007. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, Time, and elsewhere. His latest work and debut novel, Radiance of Tomorrow, was published last month by Farrar Straus and Giroux. Below is a video of Beah on the Colbert Report: http://thecolbertreport.cc.com/videos/i292oo/ishmael-beah Monday, February 9th, E-block: Laura Van Prooyen is the author of Inkblot and Altar. Her recent work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Boston Review, the Southern Review, among others. Her latest collection of poetry, Our House Was on Fire, received the McGovern Prize from Ashland Poetry Press. Wednesday, February 11th: Kevin Brockmeier writes fantasy and literary fiction. Brockmeier has won three O. Henry Prizes, the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award for Short Fiction, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and other prizes. His story collections include Things That Fall from the Sky and The View From The Seventh Layer. His novels include The Truth About Celia, The Brief History of the Dead, The Illumination, and A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip: A Memoir of Seventh Grade. Others of Brockmeier’s stories have been published in The New Yorker and elsewhere. Thursday, February 12th: Reginald Gibbons is a poet, writer, translator and professor of English, Classics, Spanish, and Portuguese at Northwestern University. He has received Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts grants in poetry, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Carl Sandburg Prize, among others. His work has been included in Best American Poetry and Pushcart anthologies. His collections include Sparrow, It’s Time, Creatures of a Day, Slow Trains Overhead, and others. He is also the author of Sweetbitter, a novel. *students: don’t forget to submit your creative work via the Writing Center page on RomanNet or to the Writing Center office!]]>