The National Book Critics Circle is again a literary partner with a featured event at the AWP conference next week. Come see NBCC board members, former board members, incoming board members and members at our bookfair booth, #313. There you can sign up for membership (students memberships $15) and play our “Name That Author” quiz to win signed books by our featured panelists. And come see our panel on The Art of Criticism on Friday at 3 pm:
February 10, 2017 3:00 pm
Ballroom C, Washington Convention Center, Level Three 801 Mt Vernon Pl NW Washington, D.C.
The National Book Critics Circle on The Art of Criticism . Four leading literary critics—Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Margo Jefferson, whose new book Negroland won an NBCC award in 2016; NPR critic Maureen Corrigan, winner of an Edgar Award for Criticism; Carlos Lozada of the Washington Post, winner of the NBCC’s Balakian Award for criticism and NBCC VP/Membership Walton Muyumba—discuss the fresh ways critics are writing about books today, including the new hybridity. All represent criticism as a provocative activity, all are always in search of something new to say.
Maureen Corrigan, book critic for NPR's Fresh Air, is a critic-in-residence and lecturer at Georgetown University. She is an associate editor of and contributor to Mystery and Suspense Writers (Scribner) and the winner of the 1999 Edgar Award for Criticism, presented by the Mystery Writers of America. She has is the author of So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came To Be and Why It Endures and the literary memoir Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading!)
The winner of a Pulitzer Prize for criticism, Margo Jefferson was for years a theater and book critic for Newsweek and The New York Times. She is the author of On Michael Jackson and Negroland, winner of a 2016 National Book Critics Circle award, and is a professor of writing at Columbia University School of the Arts.
Carlos Lozada is the nonfiction book critic of the Washington Post, where he has also served as economics editor, national security editor and Outlook editor. Before joining the Post in 2005, he was managing editor of Foreign Policy magazine and a Knight-Bagehot fellow in economics and business journalism at Columbia University. A native of Lima, Peru, he has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Notre Dame and a master’s degree from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University. In 2016, he received the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian citation for excellence in reviewing.
Walton Muyumba is book and music critic. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Chicago Tribune, The Dallas Morning News, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Republic, The New York Times, and Oxford American. He's the author of The Shadow and the Act: Black Intellectual Practice, Jazz Improvisation, and Philosophical Pragmatism (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2009). And he's an associate professor of African American literature and American culture in the Department of English at Indiana University-Bloomington.
Moderated by Tom Beer, the book and travel editor at Newsday and president of the National Book Critics Circle.