'Off the Page: Events for Readers and Writers'

Florida Atlantic University's Department of English in the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters presents the 2014 "Off the Page: Events for Readers and Writers" series. All events will take place at the FAU Boca Raton campus, 777 Glades Road, and are free and open to the public.

The first event is on Thursday, Jan. 16 at 7 p.m. in the Schmidt Center Gallery of the Performing Arts Building. Author Timothy Donnelly will discuss his books "Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit" and "The Cloud Corporation," winner of the 2012 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Donnelly also co-authored "Three Poets" with John Ashbery and Geoffrey G. O'Brien and received The Paris Review's Bernard F. Conners Prize and fellowships from the New York State Writers Institute and the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He is the poetry editor of Boston Review and teaches in the Writing Program at Columbia University's School of the Arts.

During the second event on Thursday, Jan. 24 at 7 p.m. in the Majestic Palm Room, Student Union, "Off the Page" presents Brian Turner, author of two collections of poetry titled "Here, Bullet" and "Phantom Noise." "Here, Bullet" is a New York Times Editor's Choice selection and has won numerous awards including the 2005 Beatrice Hawley Award and the 2007 Poets Prize. Turner has also been awarded a 2009 USA Hillcrest Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Fellowship and he is the 2009-10 Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Scholar. His work has been published in Poetry Daily, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Georgia Review and others. He teaches at Sierra Nevada College.

For the third event on Thursday, Feb. 20 at 7 p.m. in the Majestic Palm room, William Boggess will discuss his career as a literary agent. Boggess' first job was with Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, N.C., and then he went on to Barer Literary as the agency assistant until 2010.  After leaving for two years to work on the editorial side at Little, Brown and Company, he is returning to represent literary fiction and narrative nonfiction, as well as provide editorial support for the agency's authors. Boggess grew up in the mountains of North Carolina and attended the University of North Carolina..

The final event in the series will be a reading by 2013 Lawrence A. Sanders Writer-in-Residence Tayari Jones on Thursday, March 20 at 7 p.m. in the Majestic Palm Room. Jones is recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award in Fine Arts from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. She is a graduate of Spelman College, The University of Iowa and Arizona State University. She is currently an associate professor in the MFA program at Rutgers-Newark University, where she was awarded with a Board of Trustees Award for Scholarly Excellence, the Presidential Fellowship for Teaching Excellence and a Leader in Faculty Diversity Award. Jones' work has been supported by The National Endowment for the Arts, the United States Artists Foundation and the arts councils of Arizona and Illinois. She spent the 2011-12 academic year at Harvard University as a Radcliffe Institute Fellow, researching her forthcoming novel, "Dear History."

The 2014 Off the Page events are presented by FAU's Department of English with support from Chris and Lori Fleuhr. For more information about the series, contact Mary Sheffield at 561-297-2974.