An evening with Stacey D’Erasmo and Robert Minhinnick

Stacey D'Erasmo

Stacey D’Erasmo is the author of the novels Tea, A Seahorse Year, The Sky Below, and Wonderland, and the nonfiction book The Art of Intimacy: The Space Between. She is a former Stegner Fellow, the recipient of a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction, and the winner of an Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize from the Lambda Literary Foundation. Her essays, features, and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, The Boston Review, Bookforum, The New England Review, and Ploughshares, among other publications. She is a Frederick Lewis Allen Room Fellow at the New York Public Library for 2016-17. She is an Associate Professor of Writing and Publishing Practices at Fordham University.

Robert Minhinnick

Robert Minhinnick was born in 1952 in Neath, South Wales and studied at the universities of Aberystwyth and Cardiff, then after working in an environmental field, co-founded Friends of the Earth (Cymru) and became the organization’s joint coordinator for some years.

As well as being an active environmental campaigner, he is an essayist and poet, having published two collections of essays: Watching the Fire Eater (1992), winner of the 1993 Arts Council of Wales Book of the Year Award; and Badlands (1996), essays about post-communist Albania, California and the state of Wales and England. He has also edited Green Agenda: essays on the environment of Wales (1994). His book, To Babel and Back, was published in 2005 and won the 2006 Wales Book of the Year Award.

His poetry collections include A Thread in the Maze (1978); Native Ground (1979); Life Sentences (1983); The Dinosaur Park (1985); The Looters (1989); and Hey Fatman (1994). A Selected Poems was published by Carcanet in 1999, followed by After the Hurricane (2002) and King Driftwood (2008). In 2003, the same publisher issued his translations from the Welsh, The Adulterer's Tongue: An Anthology of Welsh Poetry in Translation. 

Robert Minhinnick lives in Porthcawl, South Wales. His debut novel, Sea Holly, was published in 2007, and shortlisted for the 2008 Ondaatje Prize.  His latest books of poetry include The Keys of Babylon (2011), shortlisted for the 2012 Wales Book of the Year Award, his New Selected Poems (2012), and Diary of the Last Man (2017), which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.