JCU Welcomes Edmund White as Writer in Residence for Summer 2015

Edmund White

Edmund White

John Cabot University is proud to announce Edmund White as the 2015 Writer in Residence at the 6th Annual Summer Institute for Creative Writing and Literary Translation, to be held from May 25 through June 25, 2015. White will be in residence at JCU from June 12 to 26, 2015. During his time at JCU he will present a craft talk on writing fiction and memoir, and conduct a masterclass for JCU creative writing students. Summer 2015 marks the first term JCU will offer graduate courses in creative writing.

Edmund White has written some twenty-five books. He is best known for his biography of French writer Jean Genet, for which he won the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is also the author of a trilogy of autobiographical novels: A Boy’s Own Story, The Beautiful Room is Empty, and The Farewell Symphony. His novel, The Married Man, takes place in France, the United States and Morocco and deals with the intimate psychological repercussions of AIDS.

He has written brief pieces on the lives of Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud and a book about unconventional Paris called The Flaneur. His most recent published works of fiction are Chaos, Hotel de Dream, and Jack Holmes and his Friend.

White also writes memoirs, including City Boy, memories of New York in the 1970s. His most recent memoir, Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris, was released in 2014. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, an officer in the French Order of Arts and Letters and a winner of the France-Amériques award. He teaches writing at Princeton and lives in New York City.

Since its founding in 2009, John Cabot University’s Institute for Creative Writing and Literary Translation has quickly become a thriving community of and for writers in Rome. With workshops in the major genres (fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction) and literary translation, the Institute is the place for creative writing students to spend serious time on their writing as they get to know the Eternal City.

Former Writers in Residence include poet Mark Strand and novelist Simon Mawer in 2010, poet Charles Wright and novelist Dorothy Allison in 2011, as well as former Poet Laureate Billy Collins and award-winning author Joyce Carol Oates in 2012. In 2013 the Writer in Residence was Pulitzer Prize winning author Jhumpa Lahiri and in 2014 JCU welcomed Tyler Dilts, crime fiction author and poet.

Learn more about studying Creative Writing in Rome.