The Glass Bookcase Reading Series: Antoine Wilson

Above: The book jacket for former Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing Fiction Fellow Antoine Wilson's debut novel, The Interloper. It's a kind of visual pun wherein the red jacket is an intruding garment -- an "interloper" if you will -- among several jackets and garments that are decidedly more conservative and, well, drab.


So, there's this fellowship program called the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and it's kind of a big deal (the website is linked on the right-hand side of this page). It's a one-year fellowship for writers who have earned their MFA degrees but who have not yet published a book. It's kind of like the Stegner fellowship at Stanford, except it pays better and you don't have to live in crusty ol' Palo Alto.

Anywho, the beauty of the thing is that given the time and money to write for a year, a good many of these Fellow types go on to publish great books and, now and again, UW-Madison gets the pleasure of having them back for a reading. The Glass Bookcase Reading Series features work by former fellows. The name of the reading series is reference to the lovely and prestigious glass bookcase in Helen C. White Hall's Creative Writing Suite where books written by former fellows are proudly displayed.

Kicking off the Glass Bookcase Reading Series for 2007-2008 is fiction writer Antoine Wilson, author of the novel The Interloper (Handsel Books / Other Press, 2007). Of course, you may also know him because his work has been featured in The Paris Review, StoryQuarterly, and Best New American Voices, among other publications, and he is a contributing editor of A Public Space. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and recipient of a Carol Houck Smith Fiction Fellowship from the University of Wisconsin, he currently lives in Los Angeles.

Of The Interloper, Wilson's debut novel, T.C. Boyle said: "As assured and sumptuously written as any first novel I've encountered--Antoine Wilson's prose sings and the story he tells here is both clever and compelling. This is writing at its very best."

In short, dude rocks and it's going to be a sweet reading: More at www.antoinewilson.com