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Jonathan Potts
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For immediate release:
August 23, 2006

Carnegie Mellon's Adamson Visiting Writers Series Features All-Alumni Lineup for 2006-07

PITTSBURGH—The 2006-07 Adamson Visiting Writers Series at Carnegie Mellon University will feature readings from alumni of the university's Department of English and will culminate in the spring with a talk by Javier Grillo-Marxuach, former writer and supervising producer on ABC's hit television series "Lost." All readings are free and open to the public, and will take place at 8 p.m. in the Adamson Wing of Baker Hall.

The series gets under way Oct. 18 with a triple feature, including 1997 graduate Shannon Gibney, a 2005 Bush Artist Fellow and former managing editor of the Minnesota Spokesman-Record, the nation's oldest African-American newspaper; 2003 graduate Kevin Gonzales, a graduate fellow at the Iowa Writers' Workshop whose poetry and fiction has appeared in McSweeney's and Playboy, among others; and 2001 graduate Karen Rigby, author of "Festival Bone," whose poetry has appeared in several journals.

The rest of the lineup is as follows:

Nov. 2: Marshall Klimasewiski — Klimasewiski is a 1988 Carnegie Mellon graduate and the author of two fiction collections, "Cottagers" and "Tyrants." His stories have appeared in The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly, among others. He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

Jan. 31: Sue Stauffacher — A 1983 graduate, Stauffacher is a children's book author, reviewer and freelance journalist. She is the author of the critically acclaimed "Donuthead" and "Harry Sue."

The date for Grillo-Marxuach's talk is still to be determined. He graduated from Carnegie Mellon in 1991 and has been a writer and producer on several television shows. He currently is a writer and co-executive producer on NBC's "Medium."

The annual Adamson Visiting Writers Series is run by the Creative Writing program in the Department of English, which is part of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Carnegie Mellon. The series is made possible by the generous support of the Pauline B. Adamson Fund.

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