Valerie Sayers & Liam Callanan will read on September 30, 2015 at 7:30 p.m. in the Hammes campus bookstore.
Valerie Sayers is the author of six novels, including her most recent, The Powers, which contemplates baseball, pacifism, and acts of witness in parallel narratives of prose and photography. Her novels Who Do You Love and Brain Fever were named New York Times“Notable Books of the Year,” and a film, "Due East," was based on her novels Due East and How I Got Him Back. Her five earlier novels were released in uniform paperback editions from Northwestern University Press in 2014. Sayers’s stories, essays, and reviews have appeared widely, in such publications as the New York Times, Washington Post, Commonweal,Zoetrope, Ploughshares, Image, Witness, and Prairie Schooner, and have been cited in Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays. Her literary prizes include a National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship and a Pushcart Prize for fiction.
Liam Callanan is an American author and professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. His novels include The Cloud Atlas (2004) and All Saints (2007).
Callanan earned his Bachelor of Arts at Yale and his Master of Arts (both in English) at Georgetown University, and a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing at George Mason University.
Callanan is an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, where he serves as the Chair of the English Department, teaches creative writing and coordinates the Ph.D. in Creative Writing program there. He also conducts workshops in creative writing for graduate students at other universities.
He describes his "teaching and research interests" as fiction writing, creative nonfiction, 20th century American literature, magic in literature, the American West, and community-based literature programs. Callanan is the creator and co-executive producer of the Poetry Everywhere animated film series, which is an offshoot of an effort to spread poetry by means of video displays on Milwaukee County Transit System buses.