September 16: Alice Mattison and Cameron Gearen

The Ordinary Evening Reading Series is proud to inaugurate its Fall 2008 program with readings by novelist (and Ordinary Evening co-curator) Alice Mattison and poet Cameron Gearen.

Alice Mattison—one of the four organizers of the Ordinary Evening series—will read from her new novel, Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn, which will be published by HarperCollins on September 16, the day of her reading. An excerpt appeared recently in The New Yorker. Alice’s most recent book, In Case We’re Separated: Connected Stories, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 2005 and won the Connecticut Book Award for fiction. She is the author of four other novels and three other collections of stories. She lives in New Haven and teaches in the MFA program at Bennington College in Vermont, and in the Fine Arts Work Center summer workshops in Provincetown, MA.

Cameron Gearen was born in New Haven and grew up in Oak Park, Illinois. She has published a chapbook of poetry entitled Night, Relative to Day that was selected by Robert Pinsky (2004). Her poetry has appeared in Fence, The Antioch Review, Crazyhorse, Poetry Northwest, The Bellingham Review, River Styx, Quarterly West, Another Chicago Magazine, Northwest Review and elsewhere. She won the Grolier Prize in 1994, the W.B. Yeats Society Poetry Contest in 2001 and the 2005 Lynda Hull Prize from Crazyhorse. She currently teaches in the English Department at Hamden Hall Country Day School.