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»John Fowles Center for Creative Writing

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The John Fowles Center for Creative Writing serves to promote and advance the discipline of creative writing in all its aspects: fiction, poetry, drama, creative non-fiction and film.

The Center offers students and non-students alike an opportunity to gain a greater appreciation for the "written word" and those who write it. Each year a distinguished group of national and international writers is invited to Chapman University, making these writers available not only to the Chapman community, but to the Orange County and, by extension, the Southern California community as well.

Now into its second decade, The John Fowles Center for Creative Writing has invited to Chapman such national and international writers as: Salman Rushdie, Luisa Valenzuela, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gioconda Belli, Alicia Partnoy, Raymond Federman, Steve Katz, Ronald Sukenick, Raúl Zurita, Elizabeth George, Ralph Berry, David Matlin, Charles Bernstein, Larry McCaffery, Alicia Kozameh, Fanny Howe, David Antin, and Willis Barnstone.

+-Current Series

Sergio Chejfec - March 26

Sergio Chejfec lived in Venezuela from 1990-2005, where he published Nueva sociedad, a journal of politics, culture and the social sciences. He currently lives in New York City and teaches in the Creative Writing in Spanish program at NYU. Chejfec has written novels, essays and a poetry collection. Among his works, one can mention Lenta biografía, Los planetas, Boca de Lobo and Los incompletes.

Bogdan Suceava - April 23

Bogdan Suceava is a mathematician, contemporary Romanian novelist and journalist. He studied mathematics at the University of Bucharest and at Michigan State University, where he was awarded his doctorate in mathematics. He is now a lecturer at California State University Fullerton. He has won a number of awards for his short stories and novels.


+-History

While on a sabbatical in 1996 at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, Dr. Mark Axelrod met a professor who had established the Arthur Miller Centre for American Studies. One of the Center's distinguishing features was that it invited national and international writers to speak while they happened to be in the UK.

Coincidentally, UEA was looking for other institutions that might have an interest in being part of a consortium to run John Fowles estate as a writers’ retreat after he died. Dr. Axelrod, having known Fowles a decade earlier through some correspondence, agreed to meet with Fowles to discuss the possibility of Chapman joining the consortium.

Dr. Axelrod traveled to Fowles’ estate in Lyme Regis where they discussed future plans; during the conversations, Dr. Axelrod seized the opportunity to ask Fowles if he would be willing to attach his name to a center at Chapman similar to the one at UEA.

John Fowles replied, “If it would be helpful to promote creative writing for students, then by all means.”  And so the John Fowles Center for Creative Writing was born.

During its twelve-year history, the JFC has invited some of the most distinguished writers in the world including Salman Rushdie, Luisa Valenzuela, Lawerence Ferlinghetti, John Ashbery, Gioconda Belli, Alicia Partnoy, Alicia Kozameh, Hiber Conteris, Raymond Federman, Steve Katz, Ronald Sukenick, Raúl Zurita, Elizabeth George, David Matlin, Laurie Stone, Charles Bernstein, Larry McCaffery, Willis Barnstone, Dacia Maraini, Francesca Duranti, Giuseppe Conte and many more. Not only has it become a Chapman University institution, but it has gained regional, national and international notoriety and has become a draw for students and community alike.

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