Visiting Writer: Poet Suzanne Buffam

Visiting Writer: Poet Suzanne Buffam

Poet Suzanne Buffam, the Creative Writing Program’s third visiting writer this spring, will share her work, including selections from her latest collection, A Pillow Book (2016), on Thursday, March 2, at 7:30 p.m. in Research Hall, Room 163, on Mason’s Fairfax Campus. The event is open to the public.

The Pillow Book, written in the tradition of the famous eleventh-century Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, was the #1 poetry collection on the Small Press Distribution’s list of bestsellers at the start of 2017, and Publishers Weekly praised the book, which they called “a journey through sleeplessness,” as “a beautifully contemplative, deeply personal work.”

Buffam’s other books include the collections Past Imperfect (2005) and The Irrationalist (2010). A native of Montreal, Canada, Buffam earned an MA in English from Concordia University and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her poetry collections include She has received the CBC Literary Award for Poetry and the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, and she was a National Endowment for the Art Literature Fellow.

Buffam will meet with MFA poetry students in the visiting writer workshop the afternoon of her visit.

Additional visiting writers ahead this semester will be part of Mason’s annual New Leaves Writer’s Conference:

  • Laura van den Berg (fiction), Monday, April 3
  • Mike Scalise (nonfiction), Tuesday, April 4
  • Spencer Reece (poetry), Thursday, April 6