Oct. 23-24: Good Thunder Reading Series

Wednesday, October 23, 2019
7:30 PM - 9:00 PM
First event

Mankato, Minn. - Minnesota State University, Mankato will host fiction and non-fiction writer Hisham Matar (pictured) and fiction writer Hannah Schultz Oct. 23-24 as the second and third writers who will be on campus for this year’s Good Thunder Reading Series.

All Good Thunder Reading Series events are free and open to the public.

The events open Wednesday, Oct. 23 with Matar giving a talk, “Narratives of Social Protest: Personal & Political,” at 7:30 p.m. at the IAM Wisdom House, located at 222 E. Walnut St. in Mankato.

On Thursday, Oct. 24, Matar will hold a workshop from 10-11 a.m. at the Emy Frentz Gallery, located at 523 S. 2nd St. in Mankato.

Later Thursday, Matar will also hold a “Talk on Craft” from 3-4 p.m. in Ostrander Auditorium, located in Centennial Student Union on the Minnesota State Mankato campus. Events will conclude with Schultz holding a reading of her work from 7:30-8:30 p.m. in the University’s Centennial Student Union, Room 245.

Matar is this year’s Nadine B. Andreas Visiting Resident in partnership with the Minnesota State Mankato Women’s Center, and Schultz is the recipient of the 2019-20 Nadine B. Andreas Graduate Assistantship.

Matar was born in New York City to Libyan parents, spent his childhood in Tripoli and Cairo, and has lived most of his adult life in London. His 2016 memoir, “The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between,” won the Pulitzer Prize for Autobiography and received the PEN American Book of the Year Award. His debut novel, “In the Country of Men,” was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His second novel, “Anatomy of a Disappearance,” was named one of the best books of the year by the Guardian and the Chicago Tribune. In 2013 Matar received the Blue Metropolis Al Majidi Ibn Dhaher Arab Literary Prize, an award for a substantial literary achievement by an Arab writer working in any genre and in any language. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and serves as an associate professor at Barnard College. He lives in London and New York City.

Schultz is a master of fine arts candidate in fiction at Minnesota State University, Mankato, where she teaches introduction to creative writing. She serves as managing editor for Blue Earth Review and treasurer for Minnesota State Mankato’s Graduate Scholars of English Association. She received one of Minnesota State Mankato’s 2018 creative summer fellowships and is the recipient of the 2019-20 Nadine B. Andreas Graduate Assistantship.

The Good Thunder Reading Series is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.

The 2019-20 Good Thunder Reading Series also receives support from Minnesota State Mankato’s Department of English, College of Arts and Humanities, Office of Institutional Diversity, the Women’s Center, the Nadine B. Andreas Endowment, the Eddice B. Barber Visiting Writer Endowment, the Robert C. Wright Endowment and individual donors. The Emy Frentz Gallery and Barnes & Noble Bookstore at Minnesota State Mankato offer additional assistance.

For more information contact Candace Black at 507-389-2680 or visit gt.mnsu.edu.

Minnesota State Mankato, a comprehensive university with 14,227 students, is part of the Minnesota State system, which includes 30 colleges and seven universities.