Each year the English Major in Writing at Northwestern University brings to campus at least one prominent writer in each genre (poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction) for one week of events including writing classes, a public reading, and individual conferences with advanced writing students.

Jo Ann Beard reads from her work as part of the third annual Spring Writers’ Festival. Joann Beard is the author of The Boys of My Youth, a widely praised collection of autobiographical essays that “summons back, with astonishing grace and power, moments of childhood epiphany as well as the cataclysms of adult life: betrayal, divorce, death.” She is also the author of a forthcoming novel. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Story, Tin House, O. The Oprah Magazine, and The Best American Essays, among other places. A graduate of the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa, she has received a Whiting Writers’ Award and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Recorded Tuesday, April 13, 2010 at Hotel Orrington - Heritage Ballroom.