Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Susan Cheever, author of numerous books including American Bloomsbury, will speak at 7 p.m., Feb. 4, 2009, at Lumina Theater in the Fisher Student Center at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

Cheever is the Buckner Lecture Speaker for spring 2009. Her discussion on the American Transcendentalist writers Alcott, Emerson, Fuller, Hawthorne and Thoreau, is sponsored by the Department of English in partnership with the Department of Creative Writing.

Her most recent book, Desire: Where Sex Meets Addiction, a memoir, was named a, "short, steamy read," by the New York Post and was reviewed favorably by the New York Times Book Review.

Her lecture will focus on the American Transcendentalist writers studied in American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work. Cheever will discuss how the Transcendentalists challenged the norms of American society with essays, novels and treatises whose beautifully rendered prose and groundbreaking assertions still resonate with readers today.

Susan Cheever is the bestselling author of 12 previous books, including five novels and the memoirs Note Found in a Bottle and Home Before Dark. Her work has been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the Boston Globe Winship Medal. She is a Guggenheim Fellow, a director of the Corporation of Yaddo, and a member of the Author's Guild Council. She teaches graduate writing in the Bennington Writing Seminars and at The New School. She lives in New York City with her family.

The Buckner Lecture Series was established by Charles F. Green, III, to provide funding to bring distinguished guest speakers to UNCW and in honor of his friend, Katherine K. Buckner.