Writers@Grinnell: Lynda Barry & Dan Chaon

Award winning authors Lynda Barry and Dan Chaon will read from their work and discuss writing on Thursday, September 29, as part of the Writers@Grinnell series at Grinnell College. The event, which is free and open to the public, will start at 8 p.m. in Joe Rosenfield ’25 Center, Room 101.

Dan Chaon is the acclaimed author of Among the Missing, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and You Remind Me of Me, which was named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, The Christian Science Monitor, and Entertainment Weekly, among other publications.

Chaon’s fiction has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories, Pushcart Prize, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. He has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award in Fiction, and he was the recipient of the 2006 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Chaon lives in Cleveland, Ohio, and teaches at Oberlin College, where he is the Pauline M. Delaney Professor of Creative Writing.

Lynda Barry has worked as a painter, cartoonist, writer, illustrator, playwright, editor, commentator, and teacher and found they are very much alike. The New York Times has described Barry as “among this country’s greatest conjoiners of words and images, known for plumbing all kinds of touchy subjects in cartoons, comic strips and novels, both graphic and illustrated.”

Barry has authored 21 books, including the beloved novel Cruddy, called “a work of terrible beauty” by The New York Times and the award-winning book What It Is, based on her now famous “Writing the Unthinkable” workshop.

Barry is currently Assistant Professor in Interdisciplinary Creativity at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and runs the Image Lab at the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery.

Barry has received numerous awards and honors for her work, among them two William Eisner awards, the American Library Association’s Alex Award, the Wisconsin Library Association’s RR Donnelly Award, the Washington State Governor’s Award, and the Holtz Center for Science & Technology Outreach Fellowship.