The Creative Arts Committee is pleased to announce that prominent Irish writer Colm Toibin will visit MCC this semester. Toibin will read from his work on Thursday, March 4, at 7 p.m., in the MCC Theater. This event is free and open to the public, and parking will be available in Lot F. He also will lead a workshop/discussion on Friday, March 5, at 12 p.m., in 5-200. This event is free and open to the MCC community.
Since the death of John McGahern, Colm Toibin is arguably the Republic of Ireland’s most important fiction writer. Toibin publishes in a variety of genres, including travel writing, poetry, criticism, and cultural commentary. He is a regular contributor to such publications as The London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, and The New Yorker. While he now lives in Dublin, his writing has an international subject matter and an international perspective. He is perhaps best known in the U.S. for The Blackwater Lightship (1999), the story of an Irish family coming to terms with the death of a family member from AIDS, which was made into a U.S. TV production in 2004. Toibin’s The Master (2004) exhibits his confidence with non-Irish subject matter through massively reconstructing Henry James’ life in a fictional account that explores the relationship between James’ carefully guarded private lives and their fictional renderings. While Toibin is a gay writer, he wears the label nonchalantly, and sexuality and sexual identity is only one of his subjects. His criticism includes Love in a Dark Time: Gay Lives from Wilde to Almodovar (2002); but he has also written extensively on figures from the Irish Renaissance, and his latest collection of short stories, Mothers and Sons (2006), concerns the struggles of a widowed single mother attempting to provide for her family in a hostile business environment, a young boy negotiating conflicting generational loyalties, and an exploration of fluid sexual identity in a vigilant, repressive culture.
For further information, please contact Maria Brandt at ext. 3394 or <"mailto:mbrandt@monroecc.edu">.
Maria Brandt
English/Philosophy
01/28/2010 |