Fiction writer Kiran Desai and poet Richard Kenney visit this week as guests of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Desai's second novel, The Inheritance of Loss, has been the subject of much acclaim, winning both the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award this year. Geeta Sharma Jensen, a member of the National Book Critics Circle board, wrote of Desai and her work:

She is the product of multiculturalism and postcolonialism, an immigrant, well-read, well-bred, whose rootlessness itself has become a kind of shelter, a form of poetry. It is this, her own inheritance and the disinheritance that has come with globalization, of which Kiran Desai sings so purely in The Inheritance of Loss.

Richard Kenney is a faculty member in the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Washington and author of The Evolution of the Flightless Bird, winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, Orrery, and The Invention of the Zero.Events:
Tuesday, March 27 @ 8:15 pm: Kiran Desai Reading, Lecture Room II, Van Allen Hall.
Wednesday, March 28 @ 11:30 am: Q&A with Kiran Desai, Frank Conroy Reading Room of the Glenn Schaeffer Library and Archives.
Wednesday, March 23 @ 8:00 pm: Richard Kenney Reading, Frank Conroy Reading Room of the Glenn Schaeffer Library and Archives.
Thursday, March 24 @ 11:00 am: Q&A with Richard Kenney, Frank Conroy Reading Room of the Glenn Schaeffer Library and Archives.

To learn more about Kiran Desai:
"Wounded by the West," NY Times Book Review, 2/12/06. Review of The Inheritance of Loss, accompanied by an audio recording of the author reading.
The Leonard Lopate Show, 2/13/06. Kiran Desai dicusses The Inheritance of Loss in this 16 minute audio interview.

Poems by Richard Kenney:
"New Year, with Nipperkin"
"Muse Interviews
"How I Used to Wish"