Hutton Honors College

Labyrinth literary magazine, Succinct Saga Society, Honors Film Discussion Group, and the Hutton Honors College present

Writers on Writing:
Translation, Collaboration, and Transformation
with Breon Mitchell, Angelo Pizzo, and Scott Russell Sanders

Wednesday, Feb. 27, 2008 * 7-9 p.m. * Lilly Library * Free and Open to All

Join three award-winning writers--translator and scholar Breon Mitchell; screenwriter and producer Angelo Pizzo; and novelist, essayist, and children's book writer Scott Sanders--for a discussion of the struggles and rewards of the writing life and the challenges of translation, collaboration, and transformation.

Breon Mitchell, an award-wining translator of international distinction, is at work on a new translation of the Günter Grass novel The Tin Drum, one of the most important pieces of Twentieth Century German literature. Mitchell's scholarly interests include literary translation, literature and the visual arts, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, and Samuel Beckett; and his many translations include Heinrich Böll's The Silent Angel and The Mad Dog, Sten Nadolny's The God of Impertinence, and Uwe Timm's Morenga, for which he was awarded the Wolff Prize by the Goethe Institute. Mitchell is a professor of comparative literature and Germanic studies and the director of IU's Lilly Library of rare books and manuscripts.

An accomplished screenwriter and film producer, Angelo Pizzo grew up in Bloomington and graduated from IU in 1971 with a B.A. in political science. After attending film school at the University of Southern California, he worked at Warner Brothers Television and then moved to Time Life Films, where he became vice president for feature film production. He wrote and co-produced the films Hoosiers (1987), which was nominated for two Academy Awards and declared by ESPN and USA to be the best sports film of all time; Rudy (1993); and The Game of Their Lives (2005). All three films won Heartland Film Festival awards; and he has received the Governor's Arts Award for contributions to the arts and the Thomas Hart Benton Award as a Distinguished Indiana University Alumnus, as well as been named a Sagamore of the Wabash, the highest civilian honor given to a resident of Indiana. Pizzo was also on campus as a Braginin Lecturer for the IU Institute for Advanced Study in Fall 2006.

Scott Russell Sanders has written more than 20 books, including novels, children's books, collections of short stories, and collections of personal nonfiction essays, with titles such as The Paradise of Bombs, Secrets of the Universe, The Force of Spirit, A Private History of Awe, and the forthcoming A Conservationist Manifesto. His Wilderness Plots, a collection of 50 tales about "preachers and profiteers, generals and journalists, . . . farmers and bone-collectors, lovers, layabouts, and other high-spirited characters" who settled the Ohio Valley between roughly 1780 and 1850, has inspired an album composed and recorded by five Indiana singer/songwriters. See their myspace page for more on this collaboration and the full-length feature recently filmed by WTIU Public Television, scheduled to air in March. A Distinguished Professor of English at IU, Sanders has received the Lannan Literary Award for his collected work in nonfiction and the Frederick Bachman Lieber Award for Distinguished Teaching, the highest teaching award given by Indiana University.

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