Rosenblatt to host Chautauqua Writers' Week

Even if you missed earlier this month's Chautauqua Writers' Festival featuring poets Stanley Plumly and Robin Becker and fiction writers Tony Doerr and Ann Pancake, there's more great literary talk featuring the likes of poet Billy Collins, fiction writers E.L. Doctorow, Joyce Carol Oates, Amy Tan and cartoonist Gary Trudeau just a 90 minute drive and a gate ticket purchase away from Buffalo during Week 3, "Roger Rosenblatt and Friends:On Writing" of the Chautauqua Institution's 2008 Lecture Series.

Essayist, author, playwright and PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer television commentator Roger Rosenblatt will interview a stellar line up of major American writers during the week of July 7 through July 11 on Chautauqua's Ampitheater stage.  His guests for literary conversation will be:

Monday, July 7th: Former (two term) US Poet Laureate Billy Collins, whose most recent collection is The Trouble With Poetry and Other Poems (2005).

Tuesday, July 8th: Novelist E.L Doctorow, author of Ragtime (1976) and World's Fair (1986) and The March (2005).

Wednesday, July 9th: Novelist an Lockport native Joyce Carol Oates, author of Them (1970), We Were the Mulvaneys (1996),  and The Gravedigger's Daughter (2007).

Thursday, July 10th: Novelist Amy Tan, author of The Joy Luck Club (1989), The Kitchen God’s Wife (1991), and The Bonesetter’s Daughter (2001).

Friday, July 11th: Cartoonist Gary Trudeau, creator of Doonesbury, the first comic strip ever to awarded a Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning.

All the lectures begin at promptly at 10:45 a.m. and are approximately an hour in length.  The Chautauqua Institution is located between the northwest shore of Chautauqua Lake and US Route 394, about 5 miles south of Mayville.  For a grid calendar of all Week 3 events at Chautauqua, visit Chautauqua Institution > Week 3 Grid Calendar.  For a list of all lectures, topics, and speakers this summer at Chautauqua, visit ciweb.org | 2008 Program | Lectures & Theme Weeks .

--R.D. Pohl