The Warren County Community College Visiting Authors Series continues on Thursday, March 7, with a reading and master class by Former The New Yorker Editor and now a renowned poet and memorist, Meghan O’Rourke. 

The reading, beginning at 7:30 p.m. in room 123A, is free and open to the public. It will be followed by a brief Q & A with the audience and a book signing. Books will be available for purchase at the reading.

O’Rourke began her career as one of the youngest editors in the history of The New Yorker. Since then, she has served as culture editor and literary critic for Slate as well as poetry editor and advisory editor for The Paris Review.

Her essays, criticism, and poems have appeared in Slate, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, Redbook, Vogue, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, and Best American Poetry. She is the author of the poetry collections Halflife (2007), Once (2011), and Sun in Days, which was named one of the 10 Best Poetry Books of 2017 by The New York Times. She was awarded the inaugural May Sarton Poetry Prize, the Union League Prize for Poetry from the Poetry Foundation, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, two Pushcart Prizes, a Whiting Award, and a Front Page Award for her cultural criticism.

A graduate of Yale University, she has taught at Princeton, The New School, and New York University. Yale University has just appointed her the next editor of The Yale Review, beginning in July of this year. She is currently working on her next book, which is about chronic illness.

Preceding the reading, O’Rourke will conduct a writing master class at the college, commencing at 4:00 p.m. This event is also free and open to the public, but pre-registration is required. Interested attendees should contact Professor BJ Ward at (908) 835-2531 or ward@warren.edu.

The WCCC Visiting Authors Series is supported by a grant from the Warren County Cultural and Heritage Commission. All facilities comply with ADA regulations and are fully accessible. Sign language interpreters are available with two weeks’ notice.

Looking ahead, save the date: Warren County Community College’s Visiting Authors Series will next host Theodora Bishop, author of On the Rocks, on Wednesday, April 3rd. Her reading begins at 7:30 p.m.

Warren County Community College offers students the option of earning an Associate of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, the first and only degree of its kind in New Jersey and a member program of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs.