Deep in the belly of Rice Hall, Oberlin writers who also wear the badge of the Creative Writing Department faculty scurry about their business in the basement of that gray fortress. These writers, well known in the world outside Oberlin, are also widely recognized within the Oberlin community. But for those students, faculty, staff and townspeople who are unfortunate enough not to know their work, the FAVA gallery presents another great opportunity to do so. At 8 p.m. on Sunday, April 25, the Main Street Reading Series continues with readings by fiction writer Sylvia Watanabe and poet David Young.

Watanabe will read from a forthcoming novel, her first.

“Revising I love, and dreaming a story, or chapter, or character before I even put down a single word. But most of all, I love writing new material when the pull of the words I have not yet written is so strong that I feel like a boat being pulled out to sea,” Watanabe said in an interview when asked her opinion on the rewards of writing.

Watanabe is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin and director of the program this spring. Her first collection of stories, Talking to the Dead, won the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for fiction and was a finalist for the 1993 PEN/Faulkner Award. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in fiction and an Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Grant in nonfiction. Her stories and essays have been widely anthologized and have been included in O. Henry and Pushcart Prize collections. She co-edited two anthologies of Asian American literature, Home to Stay and Into the Fire, both published by Greenfield Review Press.

David R. Langman Professor of Creative Writing David Young will read a new version of his translantions of Francesco Petrarch’s Rime in vitae e morta di Madonna Laura.

“It’s the greatest love story ever told,” Young contends, “and it’s probably also the funniest and most touching. Like other artists of the late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance, Petrarch understood that play is very serious, and seriousness should be very playful. The results can be delightful.”

“Young’s new version of Petrarch makes this great poet seem closer to us than before, both in language and as a living presence,” reviewer W. S. Merwin wrote. His “elegant new versions” were also characterized as “vibrant” by reviewer J. D. McClatchy.

Young has been teaching and writing at Oberlin College since 1961 where he is also Emeritus Longman Professor of English. He is the author of nine poetry collections, four critical studies, numerous translations and several anthologies. His latest collection of poems is At the White Window (Ohio State, 2000) and his book about living in Oberlin, with recipes, is Seasoning: A Poet’s Year (Ohio State, 1999). He has recently written a critical book on modernist poetry, Six Modernist Moments. Young is also an editor of FIELD Magazine and the Oberlin College Press.

Come join fellow Oberlin residents from town and College alike for this last installment of the FAVA Main Street Reading Series, organized by the FAVA gallery’s Education Coordinator Margaret Young. The FAVA gallery is located on South Main St. in downtown Oberlin.