Bates presents first Maine reading by Colson Whitehead, author of ‘John Henry Days,’ ‘Intuitionist’

Colson Whitehead, an author whose 2001 novel John Henry Days was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, reads from his work at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, March 27, in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives at Bates College, 70 Campus Ave.

Sponsored by the English department and other Bates offices and programs, this Language Arts Live reading is open to the public at no cost. For more information, please contact 207-753-6963.

Whitehead visits Bates for his first Maine reading just weeks before the release of his next book, The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky, and Death (Doubleday), a nonfiction account of his experiences at the 2011 World Series of Poker.

Best known as a novelist, Whitehead’s latest entry in that genre is the best-seller Zone One (Doubleday, 2011), a tale of life in New York after a disease leaves much of humanity zombified. “Leave it to the supremely thoughtful and snarkily funny Whitehead to do interesting things with a topic that lately has seated itself in the public’s imagination,” wrote a Seattle Times reviewer.

“Not just a juicy experiment in genre fiction but a brilliantly disguised meditation on a ‘flatlined culture’ in need of its own rejuvenating psychic jolt.”

Among Whitehead’s other novels (all on Doubleday) are The Intuitionist (1999), Esquire Magazine‘s best first novel of the year; and Apex Hides the Hurt (2006), winner of the PEN Oakland Award. In addition to the Pulitzer consideration, John Henry Days won the Young Lions Fiction Award and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.

Born in New York in 1969, Whitehead also wrote a collection of essays about his home town, 2003’s The Colossus of New York.

“Lovers of adventurous literary fiction relished Whitehead’s novels, recognizing him as an original, sardonic, yet compassionate writer,” Donna Seaman wrote in a Booklist review of Colossus.

“Anointed with a MacArthur ‘genius’ grant, Whitehead now presents a ravishing cycle of imaginative and evocative prose poems in tribute to his home, New York City, the quintessential metropolis of dreams.  . . . Whitehead riffs poignantly and playfully on myriad strategies for urban survival as he incisively distills the kaleidoscopic frenzy of the city into startlingly vital metaphors and cartoon-crisp analogies.”

Whitehead’s shorter works have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Harper’s and Grantland, the sports and pop-culture blog that sent him to the World Series of Poker.

In addition to the MacArthur Fellowship, Whitehead has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award and a fellowship at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.

Whitehead is a lecturer in creative writing in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton. A Harvard graduate, Whitehead’s first job in publishing was at the Village Voice, where he reviewed television, books and music.