On Wednesday, October 15, poet Ben Lerner and fiction writer Steven Millhauser will read from their works as part of the Althea Ward Clark W’21 Reading Series of the Program in Creative Writing at the Lewis Center for the Arts. The reading, beginning at 4:30 p.m. at the Berlind Theatre at the McCarter Theatre Center, is free and open to the public.

Ben Lerner, who will be introduced by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and Princeton University professor of Creative Writing Paul Muldoon, is the author of several full-length poetry collections, including Mean Free Path (2010) and Angle of Yaw (2006), which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Northern California Book Award. Noting his use of “arresting lines that are comical, anxious, and hauntingly true,” Boston Review critic Craig Morgan Teicher described Lerner’s aim in Angle of Yaw to “juxtapose discordant elements of noise such that their collective racket cancels each component out, leaving behind a language purged by negation — refreshed, defiant, and wholly self-aware.” Also a fiction writer and essayist, Lerner’s novels include Leaving the Atocha Station (2011) and 10:04 (2014).

Steven Millhauser, who will be introduced by novelist and professor of Creative Writing Chang-rae Lee, is the author of numerous works of fiction including Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1997, and Dangerous Laughter, a New York Times Book Review Best Book of the Year. His most recent collection, We Others: New and Selected Stories, won the Story Prize and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. In awarding the Story Prize the judges called We Others “a powerful and intriguing collection of stories, marked by page after page of beautifully written, intelligent, and sensitive prose.”

Mr. Millhauser is a recipient of the Lannan Award and has been honored by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has been translated into 15 languages. His story “Eisenheim the Illusionist” was the basis of the 2006 film The Illusionist. He currently teaches at Skidmore College and lives in Saratoga Springs, New York.

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