Contact: Leah Barbour
STARKVILLE, Miss.--A celebrated West Indian author will present selections from his latest work during a Veterans Day [Nov. 11] program at Mississippi State.
Robert Antoni's visit is being sponsored by the university's English department and Shackouls Honors College. Free and open to the public, the 7:30 p.m. Monday reading will take place in Griffis Residence Hall's fourth-floor Honors Forum Room.
He will read from "As Flies to Whatless Boys" (Akashic Books 2013), a 320-page novel that will be on sale both before and after the reading.
Though born in the U.S. to Trinidadian parents, Antoni grew up in the Bahamas. His characters use the Caribbean vernacular in a British West Indies setting common to all five of his novels.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler said Antoni's newest work teaches its audience about a different world.
"'As Flies to Whatless Boys' is a brilliant novel that is rivetingly localized in a distant time and an untouched place, and yet somehow speaks vibrantly to this present age and to the universal human condition," Butler wrote in a review. "Robert Antoni is a treasure of our literary culture."
Antoni has been honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship, Commonwealth Writers Prize and National Endowment for the Arts grant. He also recently received the National Library of Trinidad and Tobago Lifetime Literary Award. His works have been widely translated.
In addition to a master's degree from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, Antoni holds a doctorate from the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa. He lives in Manhattan, N.Y., and teaches in the New School University's graduate writing program. Other biographical information is available at http://robertantoni.com/.
For more information on the MSU program, contact Becky Hagenston, associate professor of English, at 662-324-3644.