Reading at Notre Dame by graduating Creative Writing Honors Concentrators and Concentrators.
Graduating students of the undergraduate Creative Writing Honors Concentration & Concentrators at the University of Notre Dame will be reading from their final theses at the Hammes Bookstore on April 29th, 2016 at 3:30 p.m.
The reading is free and open to the public.
Mckenzie Hightower is a senior at the University of Notre Dame. She recently attended the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop and the New York State Summer Writers Institute this past July. Works from her unpublished short story collection, "We All Walk Away, But We Do Not Leave" have appeared in Bull Magazine: Men's Fiction and are forthcoming in Tin House's Open Bar, Psychopomp, and 30N. She has just accepted a Fulbright Student Fellowship and will be teaching English and creative writing in Poland for the next year.
Gerard Ledley is a Senior, who, in addition to a major in English and a Concentration in Creative Writing, holds minors in Philosophy and Business Economics. A native of Brewster, NY, he calls Zahm House his on-campus home, where he serves as a Resident Assistant. Gerard recently finished his English Honors Thesis, entitled "David Foster Wallace and The New Literary Period" in which he explores the successor to literary and cultural postmodernism through Wallace's three novels. He counts Wallace, as well as Faulkner, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and David Lynch as his primary artistic influences, in that they consistently make him feel the most inadequate. Gerard enjoys writing both short fiction and poetry, and hopes to continue doing so for the rest of his days.
John Pietrowicz is from Wilmette, IL, and a fencer here at ND. Primarily, he writes poetry, and he recently completed his Creative Thesis, which is a collection of absurdist poetry. After graduation, he plans to get an MFA or to begin a post-baccalaureate Computer Science degree.