Joseph Boyden to read at UVM on Sept 25

  

I’m excited to announce that, at 4:00 pm on Friday September 25th, award-winning Canadian writer Joseph Boyden will be reading at Memorial Lounge in Waterman.
The author of a short story collection Born With a Tooth , novels Three Day Road and Through Black Spruce , and his recent biography of Métis leaders Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont, Joseph Boyden has quickly ascended the ranks to be one of Canada’s most widely read writers working today. His novel Three Day Road (2005) won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the CBA Libris Fiction Book of the Year, the Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award, and in the US was also featured as a pick on the Today Show book club. In 2008, his second novel, Through Black Spruce, won the Giller Prize, Canada’s most prestigious fiction prize.
Born and raised in Toronto, Boyden completed an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of New Orleans and then returned to the northernmost regions of Ontario where he worked for two years in the James Bay region as a Professor of Aboriginal Programs. His time there working with the Mushkegowuk Cree, not to mention his own Métis ancestry, have made the land and people of this region his “muse and obsession” and the setting for much of his work. Today he divides his time between Northern Ontario and New Orleans where he and his wife, novelist Amanda Boyden, are currently Writers in Residence.
Joseph and Amanda will both be reading at the Burlington Book Festival on September 26th, but I’ve managed to arrange for Joseph to do a reading at UVM at 4 pm at the Memorial Lounge. I’ve taught his novel Three Day Road to hundreds of students over the last three years in courses ranging from English 180 and 182 to my TAP class. It’s an extraordinary book and I think this will be a great opportunity for students to hear him read and to ask him questions about his work.

For more information on Joseph Boyden and his work, see his website at http://josephboyden.com.
Reviews of Through Black Spruce:
“Powerful and powerfully told. . .Much of this novel reflects its crisp, poetic title…Will speaks with the straight-faced good humor of Louise Erdrich’s Nanapush…in the novel’s most moving section, Will flees to live along in wilderness few people ever even see. It’s an experience beautifully rendered in the raw poetry of Boyden’s prose.”
—The Washington Post

“Anguished, angry Uncle Will’s revenge drama is almost perfect in pitch and execution. Tragedy and comedy unspool together in a startlingly casual manner when Will speaks, they way they do in life.  When Boyden is at his best, as he often is here, he is matchless.”
—The Minneapolis Star Tribune
Reviews of Three Day Road: “Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road is a brilliant novel. You will suffer a bit, but it’s overwhelmingly worth the voyage.”
—Jim Harrison