Janet Burroway

Celebrated writer Janet Burroway will be giving a reading at Illinois State University at 7:00 p.m. on Tuesday, November 17, in the East Lounge, 3rd Floor, in the Bone Student Center. There will also be a meet-the-author session from 4:00 to 5:00 p.m. in the Publications Unit, located in 307 Fairchild Hall. “Burroway has almost single-handedly (re)defined the area of fiction,” said Professor Ricardo Cruz. “She has shaped the genre in super fashionable ways that other writers wish they could do. Burroway is so effective/affective on the page that she seems to play with white space as if it’s a toy only she owns. She is a master of setting, of what is and is not, and of whatever that works.”  

Burroway's textbook Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft (seventh edition, Addison Wesley Longman, 2006) is the most widely used creative writing text in America, and Imaginative Writing: The Elements of Craft is in preparation for its third edition. Janet Burroway is the author of plays, poetry, children's books, and eight novels, including Pulitzer Prize nominee The Buzzards, Raw Silk (runner-up for the National Book Award), Opening Nights, Cutting Stone, and the 2009 Bridge of Sand. Her children's book The Giant Jam Sandwich has been translated into twenty languages and scored for orchestra. Recent works include a collection of essays, Embalming Mom, and the plays Sweepstakes, Medea With Child, and Parts of Speech, which have received readings and productions in New York, London, San Francisco, Hollywood, and various regional theatres. 

“Burroway’s campus visit promises to be a really lively, engaging event, an atmosphere replete with unique characters, and a reading of things vivid, moving, and resonant,”  Cruz noted.

This event, sponsored by the Department of English, is free and open to the public. For more information, contact Ricardo Cortez Cruz, Professor of English at ISU and Director of Creative Writing, at (309) 438-7296 or rccruz@ilstu.edu.