Writers in Residence program kicks off October 3

Nationally-renowned writer Peter Trachtenberg will visit Flagler College on October 3rd according to an announcement received by Historic City News from Director of Public Information, Brian Thompson.

Trachtenberg will give a public reading in the Gamache-Koger Room at the Ringhaver Student Center at 50 Sevilla Street in St. Augustine beginning at 6:00 p.m. This will be the first event of the college’s 2011-2012 Writers in Residence Program.

Trachtenberg is the author of “The Book of Calamities: Five Questions about Suffering and Its Meaning” (Little, Brown 2008), a book that combines reportage, memoir and moral philosophy. The work won the 2009 Phi Beta Kappa Ralph Waldo Emerson Award for works that contribute significantly to interpretations of the intellectual and cultural condition of humanity.

“Trachtenberg … rais[es] complex questions about justice, malice, compassion, blame, self-pity, personal responsibility, faith, and doubt …” writes O: The Oprah Magazine. “The artistry and humor of his writing, the pain of his mercilessly self-punishing insights, the relentlessness of his guilty misanthropy … all give Trachtenberg a solid claim to being a genuine American Dostoevsky,” writes The Washington Post.

Trachtenberg’s fiction, essays and reportage have appeared in The New Yorker, Harpers, Bomb, A Public Space, Bidoun, O: The Oprah Magazine and The New York Times Travel Magazine. He has performed his monologues at Dixon Place, PS 122 and The Kitchen, and broadcast commentaries on NPR’s “All Things Considered.”

The event is free and open to the public, but seating is limited and is on a first-come, first-served basis. Sign language interpreters available upon request.