Peter Trachtenberg, an award-winning writer, will present a reading on Thursday, Feb. 20 at 7:30 p.m. in the Rehm Library at the College of the Holy Cross. The event, which is free and open to the public, is sponsored by the English department’s Creative Writing Program and the Rev. Michael C. McFarland, S.J. Center for Religion, Ethics and Culture.
Trachtenberg, a nonfiction writer and an assistant professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, received a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, the Nelson Algren Award for Short Fiction, a Whiting Writers Fellowship, a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2010), and a residency at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center (2012). His works include “7 Tattoos: A Memoir in the Flesh” (Penguin Books, 1998), “The Book of Calamities: Five Questions about Suffering and Its Meaning” (Little Brown, 2008), and “Another Insane Devotion” (Da Capo, 2012), a book about the search for a missing cat that also explores issues of love and marriage. “The Book of Calamities” was awarded the 2009 Phi Beta Kappa Society’s Ralph Waldo Emerson Award “for scholarly studies that contribute significantly to interpretations of the intellectual and cultural condition of humanity.” Trachtenberg’s essays, journalism, and short fiction pieces have been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s, BOMB, TriQuarterly, The Oprah Magazine, The New York Times Travel Magazine, and A Public Space.
Spring 2014 Working Writers Series schedule:
- Thursday, March 13 at 7:30 p.m. – Poet Gail Mazur
- Thursday, March 27 at 7:30 p.m. – Nonfiction writer Sam Freedman
- Thursday, April 10 at 7:30 p.m. – Siri Hustvedt to give “Vocation of the Writer Talk”
- Thursday, April 24 at 3:30 p.m. – Celebration of Senior Creative Writing Concentration
