ANN ARBOR – Jamie O'Neill, who shot to prominence in 2001 with the publication of his novel "At Swim, Two Boys," will be visiting three Michigan communities as part of LGQRI on Tour, a project funded by the ARCUS Foundation to bring noted LGBT scholars, activists and artists on mini-tours of Michigan.
After receiving reportedly the largest-ever advance for an Irish literary work, O'Neill's novel was written and researched over a 10-year period, while he slaved uncomplainingly as a night porter in a London psychiatric hospital. Raised in County Dublin, he now lives in Galway, in the romantic wilds of Ireland's western industrial estates. He'll read from his current novel, which continues the story "At Swim, Two Boys" beyond the events of Easter 1916.
O'Neill's schedule is as follows:
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor campus: Monday, Nov. 13 at 5 p.m. at the Michigan League's Hussey Room. The event is cosponsored by the U-M MFA Program in Creative Writing's Zell Visiting Writers Series. For information, call 734-764-9537.
Western Michigan University: Wednesday, Nov. 15 at 8 p.m. at Little Theater, East Campus (corner of Oakland and Oliver in Kalamazoo). For directions: http://www.wmich.edu/littletheatre/location.html
Wayne State University: Thursday, Nov. 16 at 7:30 p.m. at The Bernath Auditorium inside WSU's new Adamany Undergraduate Library in the center of the Wayne State Campus. This reading is presented as The 2006 Philip J. Traci Memorial Reading to honor the late WSU professor who was tragically murdered in an unsolved Detroit hate crime in 1984. For more information, please call 313-577-2450.
All readings are free and open to the public.
O'Neill's visit is sponsored by the University of Michigan's Institute for Research on Women and Gender's Lesbian-Gay-Queer Research Initiative (LGQRI).
