Published on September 19, 2014  
acevedo

Poet and novelist Chantel Acevedo will read from her work at Samford Monday September 22 at 7 p.m. in The Howard Room. Acevedo is the first writer of the 2013-2014 BACHE Visiting Writers Series.

Acevedo has received many awards for her writing, including the Latino International Book Award and an Alabama State Council on the Arts Literature Fellowship. A Cuban-American born and raised in Miami, Florida, Acevedo has spent time in Japan and New Zealand as a Fulbright Scholar.  She is currently associate professor of English and Alumni Writer-in-Residence at Auburn University, where she founded the Auburn Writers Conference and edits the Southern Humanities Review . She is the author of the novels Love and Ghost Letters  (St. Martin's Press) and A Falling Star  (Carolina Wren Press), as well as the young adult novel, Song of the Red Cloak .  Her newest novel, The Distant Marvels is forthcoming from Europa Editions.  Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Prairie Schooner , American Poetry Review , North American Review , and Chattahoochee Review , among others.  
Acevedo's writing reflects the complexity of her cultural heritage and her prose blends the realist novelist tradition and its close attention to the ordinary, objective world with the mysticism and magic invoked by Cuban settings and their repressed, buried histories of political trauma.  Her novels are at once accessible, often following the familiar plot line of the coming of age story, and ambitious, spanning several decades of Cuban and American history and invoking the richness of both literary traditions.

A reception will follow.

 
Samford is a leading Christian university offering undergraduate programs grounded in the liberal arts with an array of nationally recognized graduate and professional schools. Founded in 1841, Samford is the 87th-oldest institution of higher learning in the United States. Samford enrolls 6,101 students from 45 states, Puerto Rico and 16 countries in its 10 academic schools: arts, arts and sciences, business, divinity, education, health professions, law, nursing, pharmacy and public health. Samford fields 17 athletic teams that compete in the tradition-rich Southern Conference and ranks 6th nationally for its Graduation Success Rate among all NCAA Division I schools.