The John Fowles Center for Creative Writing serves to promote and advance the discipline of creative writing in all its aspects: fiction, poetry, drama, creative non-fiction and film.
The Center offers students and non-students alike an opportunity to gain a greater appreciation for the "written word" and those who write it. Each year a distinguished group of national and international writers is invited to Chapman University, making these writers available not only to the Chapman community, but to the Orange County and, by extension, the Southern California community as well.
Now into its second decade, The John Fowles Center for Creative Writing has invited to Chapman such national and international writers as: Salman Rushdie, Luisa Valenzuela, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gioconda Belli, Alicia Partnoy, Raymond Federman, Steve Katz, Ronald Sukenick, Raúl Zurita, Elizabeth George, Ralph Berry, David Matlin, Charles Bernstein, Larry McCaffery, Alicia Kozameh, Fanny Howe, David Antin, and Willis Barnstone.
Magris graduated from the University of
Turin, where he studied German studies, and has been a professor of modern
German literature at the University of Trieste since 1978. His first book on the Habsburg myth in modern
Austrian literature rediscovered central European literature. His journalistic
writings have been collected in Dietro le
parole ("Behind Words", 1978) and Itaca e oltre ("Ithaca and Beyond", 1982). He has written
essays on E.T.A. Hoffmann, Henrik Ibsen, Italo Svevo, Robert Musil, Hermann
Hesse and Jorge Luis Borges. His novels and theatre productions, many
translated into several languages, include Illazioni
su una sciabola (1984), Danubio
(1986), Stadelmann (1988), Un altro mare (1991), and Microcosmi (1997). His breakthrough was
Danubio (1986), which is a magnum opus. Magris
tracks the course of the Danube from its sources to the sea. The whole trip
evolves into a colorful, rich canvas of the multicultural European history. His latest novel is titled, “Blindly”
(2011). Magris won the Bagutta Prize in
1987 for Danubio and the Strega Prize in 1997 for Microcosmi. He was also
awarded the Erasmus Prize in 2001 and a Prince of Asturias Award for Literature
in 2004. On July 31, 2006 he won the Austrian State Prize for European
Literature. On October 18, 2009 he received the Peace Prize of the German Book
Trade during the Frankfurt Book Fair.
Maxine Hong Kingston is
a Chinese American author and Professor Emeritus at the University of
California, Berkeley, where she graduated with a BA in English in 1962.
Kingston has written three novels and several works of non-fiction about the
experiences of Chinese immigrants living in the United States. She has
contributed to the feminist movement with such works as her memoir The Woman Warrior, which discusses
gender and ethnicity and how these concepts affect the lives of women. Kingston
has received several awards for her contributions to Chinese American Literature
including the National Book Award in 1981 for her novel China Men. Other awards
include: General Nonfiction Award: National Book Critics Circle for The Woman
Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, 1976; Anisfield-Wolf Race
Relations Award, 1978; National Endowment for the Arts Writers Award, 1980; National
Book Award for General Nonfiction for China Men, 1981; National Endowment for
the Arts Writers Award, 1982’; PEN West Award in fiction for Tripmaster Monkey:
His Fake Book, 1989; Lifetime Achievement Award from the Asian American Literary
Awards, 2006; Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the
National Book Foundation, 2008.
Miguel Syjuco is a Filipino writer from Iloilo, and is
the son of Augusto Syjuco Jr., the current representative of the second
district of Iloilo. His first novel, Ilustrado,
won the 2008 Palanca Awards Grand Prize for the Novel in English, the 2008 Man
Asian Literary Prize and the 2010 QWF Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for
Fiction. He lives and works in Montreal.
Zulfikar A. Ghose is a novelist, poet and
essayist. A native of Pakistan who has long lived in Texas, he writes in the
surrealist mode of much Latin American fiction, blending fantasy and harsh
realism. Ghose grew up a Muslim in
Sialkot and in largely Hindu Bombay (Mumbai), then moved with his family to
England. He graduated from Keele (England) University in 1959 and married
Helena de la Fontaine, an artist from Brazil (a country he later used as the
setting for six of his novels). His first novel, The Contradictions (1966),
explores differences between Western and Eastern attitudes and ways of life. In
The Murder of Aziz Khan (1967) a
small farmer tries to save his traditional land from greedy developers. Ghose’s
trilogy The Incredible Brazilian,
comprising The Native (1972), The
Beautiful Empire (1975), and A Different World (1978), presents the
picaresque adventures, often violent or sexually perverse, of a man who goes
through several reincarnations. Ghose’s other novels include Crump’s Terms (1975), A New History of Torments (1982), and The Triple Mirror of the Self (1992)
among others. He currently teaches
creative writing at the University of Texas-Austin.
Andrew Lam is a Vietnamese
American writer. He was born in South Vietnam, where he led a privileged life
as the son of General Lâm Quang Thi of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam
attended the University of California, Berkeley where he majored in
biochemistry. He is currently the web editor
of New America Media. Lam is the author
of "Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora" and
"East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres." He is also a senior
editor and writer at New America Media and for a period of 8 years, a
commentator on NPR's All Things Considered. His next book, "Birds of
Paradise" - a collection of short stories - will be published in 2013. He
lives in San Francisco, California.
Karen Tei Yamashita is a Japanese American
writer. Her works, several of which
contain elements of magic realism, include novels I Hotel (2010), Circle K
Cycles (2001), Tropic of Orange (1997), Brazil-Maru (1992), and Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (1990). Tei Yamashita's
novels emphasize the necessity of polyglot, multicultural communities in an
increasingly globalized age, even as they destabilize orthodox notions of
borders and national/ethnic identity. Yamashita
was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Award. She is an Associate Professor of Literature
at University of California, Santa Cruz, where she teaches creative writing and
Asian American literature.