The Jack Ridl Visiting Writers Series of Hope College will feature poet Shane Book and novelist Mat Johnson on Thursday, Feb. 7, at 7 p.m. in the Knickerbocker Theatre in downtown Holland.
The public is invited. Admission is free.
Shane Book’s first collection, “Ceiling of Sticks” (University of Nebraska Press), won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, and was a Poetry Society of America “New American Poet” Selection. Book is a graduate of New York University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. His work has appeared in 17 anthologies; in more than 45 magazines in the United States, United Kingdom and Canada; and on film. He has received scholarships to the MacDowell Colony, Brazil’s Sacatar Foundation, the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference and Naropa University’s Summer Writing.
Mat Johnson is the author of the novel “Prym, Drop, and Hunting in the Harlem,” the nonfiction novella “The Great Negro Plot,” and the comic books “Incognergo” and “Dark Rain.” He is a recipient of the United States Artist James Baldwin Fellowship, The Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, and a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. Johnson is a faculty member at the University of Houston Creative Writing Program.
Additional information is available online at hope.edu/vws.
The Knickerbocker Theatre is located at 86 E. Eighth St.