Manic Caravan Presents: Aldon Nielsen

The reincarnation of the popular Minor American Reading Series, Manic Caravan will bring to campus a host of visiting writers and poets who will join us on the path of social edification in pursuit of exegetical enthusiasms. Aldon Nielsen was the first winner of the Larry Neal Award for poetry and has to date published five volumes of verse: Heat Strings, Evacuation Routes, Stepping Razor, VEXT and Mixage. His poetry was selected by John Ashbery for the Best American Poems anthology and has also received two Gertrude Stein Awards for innovation. His first volume of literary criticism, Reading Race, won the SAMLA Studies Prize, a Myers Citation and the Kayden Award for best book in the humanities. Subsequent works of scholarship include Writing between the Lines, C.L.R. James: A Critical Introduction, Black Chant and Integral Music: Languages of African American Innovation, which was the winner of the Josephine Miles Award. Aldon Nielsen is the George and Barbara Kelly Professor of American Literature at Penn State University.