Two acclaimed Writing Program alumni return to campus

Poet Kevin Prufer and fiction writer Teddy Wayne, both alumni of The Writing Program in the Department of English in Arts & Sciences, will read from their work at 8 p.m. Thursday, April 22.

Prufer (MFA ’96) is the author of four books of poetry as well as editor of Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing. Wayne (MFA ’07) is the author of the forthcoming novel Kapitoil.

The talk — sponsored by The Writing Program Reading Series — is free and open to the public and takes place in Hurst Lounge, Room 201, Duncker Hall. A reception and booksigning will immediately follow.

Duncker Hall is located at the northwest corner of Brookings Quadrangle. For more information, call (314) 935-7130 or e-mail David Schuman at dschuman@wustl.edu.

Prufer is the author of the collections National Anthem (2008), Fallen from a Chariot (2005), The Finger Bone (2002) and Strange Wood (1998) as well as the editor of four anthologies. He has served as editor of Pleiades, an international magazine of poetry, fiction, essays and reviews, since 1996 and also co-directs the Pleiades Press, which focuses on modern and contemporary American poetry. An associate editor of American Book Review, he also is vice president/secretary of the National Book Critics Circle and a professor of English at the University of Central Missouri in Warrensburg, Mo.

Prufer’s many honors include three Pushcart prizes, two Best American Poetry selections, numerous awards from the Poetry Society of America, the Prairie Schooner/Strousse Award, the William Rockhill Nelson Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Lannan Foundation.

Kapitoil, Wayne’s debut novel, will be released by Harper Perennial this month. The story centers on Karim Issar, a brilliant though unsung computer programmer from Qatar, who arrives on Wall Street in the fall of 1999. After creating Kapitiol, an ingenious program that predicts oil futures by analyzing political news stories, Karim catapults up the corporate ladder but finds himself adrift in New York’s disparate social scenes. Yet as his fluency with the American idiom grows, so does the disapproval of his Muslim father, forcing Karim to make a decision that will determine his future, his firm’s and to whom — and where — his loyalties lie.

Wayne

“Wayne’s strong and heartfelt debut novel … zips through a minefield of potential cliches and comes out unscathed, striking a balance of humor and keen insight that propels the story through Karim’s education about the West’s ethics and its capitalism, while in the background the World Trade Center looms,” writes Publisher’s Weekly. “It’s a slick first novel that beautifully captures a time that, in retrospect, seems tragically naive.”

Wayne is the recipient of a 2010 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His fiction, satire and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Time, Vanity Fair, Esquire, McSweeney’s and the Los Angeles Times, among others.