Campus News in Brief

Authors to read work on campus

The annual Adamson Visiting Writers Series has announced its speakers for this year. The series, run by the Creative Writing Program in the English deparment, a part of H&SS at Carnegie Mellon, will feature different writers reading their work on campus.

This year, poet Matthea Harvey will kick off the series on Oct. 23. Harvey is the author of Sad Little Breathing Machine: Poems and a contributing editor to Jubilat, an international literary magazine based at the University of Massachusetts. She teaches poetry at Sarah Lawrence University and lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.

The rest of the series features a number of varied authors.

Alyce Miller, most recently author of Water: Nine Stories, is a winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Fiction. Miller is also the author of the novel Stopping For Green Lights and a collection of short stories titled The Nature of Longing, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction in 1994.

Charles D’Ambrosio is a short story writer and essayist who was a 2007 United States Artists Rasmuson Fellow. D’Ambrosio is the author of The Dead Fish Museum and The Point: And Other Stories with work published in The New Yorker and The Paris Review.

Denis Johnson is the author of the 2007 novel Tree of Smoke which won the National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He will read at the annual Adamson Awards to honor student writers.

Poet to discuss culture inclusion

Steve Robbins, an expert on diversity and culture inclusion, will speak at 4:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 16 at Carnegie Mellon University’s McConomy Auditorium. His talk, “Unintentional Intolerance,” is part of Carnegie Mellon’s University Lecture Series and is open to the public.

As an author, Robbins works with organizations nationwide to help them develop the necessary skills and environment to maximize diverse human resources. He has consulted with a variety of major corporations including Microsoft, Toyota, PepsiCo and General Mills, along with organizations such as NASA, the National Cancer Institute and the Federal Reserve Bank.

His book What If? Short Stories to Spark Diversity Dialogue highlights his unique approach to creating diversity and meeting inclusion challenges. Noted for his resonating, humorous style, he also writes and edits a weekly e-newsletter, “Inclusion Insights,” on diversity and inclusion.

Born in Vietnam, Robbins immigrated to the United States when he was 5 years old at a time when there was much anti-war and anti-Vietnamese sentiment in the United States. He partly credits this experience for his insightful perspective on diversity and inclusion.