Readings & Artist Talk: Nick Flynn, Stephen Elliott and Paul Stopforth

In addition to 100 open-enrollment workshops in visual arts and creative writing, the Fine Arts Work Center Summer Program offers free, nightly readings and artist talks for the community. Books will be available for purchase and signing, cash and cards are accepted.

Nick Flynn is the author of nine books, including the memoirs, The Reenactments, The Ticking is the Bomb: A Memoir of Bewilderment, and Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, and the poetry collections My Feelings, The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands, and Some Ether. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, the Paris Review, and National Public Radio’s This American Life. He has received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, PEN, the Library of Congress, and was a Fellow at The Fine Arts Work Center. He is currently a professor on the creative writing faculty at the University of Houston.

Stephen Elliott is the author of eight books including the memoir, The Adderall Diaries, the novel Happy Baby, and the essay collection, Sometimes I Think About It. He has directed three movies including About Cherry which premiered at the Berlinale and was released by IFC, and After Adderall, which was the closing night film for the Slamdance Film Festival. Most recently he is working on the web series Driven.

Early in his career Paul Stopforth created several bodies of work that were startling in their courageous engagement with the repressive society in which he lived. His uncompromising refusal to turn away from a world of pain and injustice cost him dearly, but earned him enormous respect from his peers and from discerning art critics who saw his work in its first, youthful incarnations at The Market Theatre Gallery, where he was a director from 1977 to 1984. Invited to be Artist-in-Residence at Tufts University Stopforth left South Africa for the United States in the late 1980s, despairing that there would ever be change in his country. He took up a teaching position at Harvard University and taught drawing while on the faculty of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. He recently retired to paint on a full-time basis. Stopforth has exhibited his work since 1971 in galleries and museums in South Africa, the United States and Europe. He has served as curator and juror for a number of institutions and competitions, and in 2004 he delivered the Ruth First Memorial Lecture at Brandeis University. His work is held in many public and private collections in South Africa and abroad. He is represented by The Schoolhouse Gallery in Provincetown.