Wood and other writers to respond to attack at book reading

Wood and other writers to respond to attack at book reading
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Susan Wood, Rice English professor, will be among the area writers to read at an event at the Brazos Bookstore organized in response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and current global situation.

“Trying To Praise the Mutilated World: Writers Respond to the Global Crisis” will be held at the Brazos Bookstore, 2421 Bissonnet, Oct. 29 at 7 p.m. The readings are free and open to the public. Voluntary contributions will be given to the Red Cross.

The event was organized by the University of Houston Creative Writing Program and Brazos Bookstore. It is intended “as a human response to the current global crisis,” said Marie Howe, visiting poet in the University of Houston program. “It’s a night about literature, when literature speaks.”

“Writers are gathering all over the nation in order to bravely consider together the state of the world,” said Julie Checkoway, director of the UH program. The event, she suggested, will be a night when writers “come together to pay attention to the wisdom that writing may provide us in these troubled times.”

The evening takes its name from a poem by Adam Zagajewski that appeared in the issue of The New Yorker devoted to the events of Sept. 11.

Rice’s Wood is an award-winning poet who has written about topics such as grieving, growth and memory. In 1998, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship for poetry, and the following year she earned a Pushcart Prize for her poem “Diary.” The poem explored memory, looking at how people who share an event do not necessarily share the same memory of it. In September 2000 her book of poetry, “Asunder,” was chosen for publication through the National Poetry Series. The book is, in part, about “grief and how we live with it, how … we metabolize grief as fast as we have to,” Wood has said.

Wood also is the author of “Bazaar” (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980), “Campo Santo” (Louisiana State University Press, 1991) and “Counting the Losses” (Jones Alley, Colorado Springs, 1995).

Her poems have appeared in numerous publications, including the Antioch Review, Antaeus, the Missouri Review, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Poetry and the Kenyon Review.

For more information on the Brazos Bookstore event call (713) 523-0701.