October 18, 2016

Hackettstown, N.J., October 18, 2016 – Come to an evening of literary enrichment at Centenary University with featured guest, Megan Mayhew Bergman. As part of the University’s Literary Speaker Series, this is an event that should not be missed! Bergman is the author of short story collections Birds of a Lesser Paradise, Almost Famous Women, and the upcoming The Exhibition all from Scriber Books. Members of the community and the university are invited to attend this event that will be held on November 9, 2016 in the Front Parlours of the Edward W. Seay Administration Building. The event is funded in part by the Warren County Cultural & Heritage Commission and the international English honor society Sigma Tau Delta. 

Bergman will begin with a reading at 6 p.m. followed by a book signing and a Reading and Writing Workshop. The event is free and open to the public, but registration is required for the workshop portion of the evening. For those interested in participating in the workshop, please contact Assistant Professor of Creative Writing Emilia Phillips at 908-852-1400 ext. 2385.

“I’m so excited about our students and community members having the opportunity to hear Bergman’s works and to have them work with her in a generative writing workshop following the reading,” Emilia Phillips, Assistant Professor of Creative Writing said. “This is where the work in the classroom and the work of publishing writers intersect.”

Bergman’s works have appeared in a great variety of literary, cultural, and mainstream publications, including the Best American Short Stories (2011 and 2015), NPR’s Weekend Review, and NPR’s Selected Shorts. Bergman is regular contributor to The New York Times, Ploughshares, Salon, and Oxford American. A North Carolina native, Bergman now lives on a small farm in Vermont. She is the Associate Director of Bennington College’s MFA program and serves as a Justice of the Peace for the town of Shaftsbury.

While she is based in Vermont, Bergman’s authorship has been recognized internationally. Her stories have been translated into German, Dutch, and Italian. Author Sara Gruen (Water for Elephants) regards Bergman’s first story collection as an “astonishing debut collection, by a writer reminiscent of such greats as Alice Munro, Elizabeth Strout, and even Chekhov.”

Of Bergman’s most recent collection of short stories, Almost Famous Women, the National Public Radio (NPR) says, “Bergman right now may be an “almost famous woman” herself — a recognized minor name in contemporary literature. But if she keeps on writing these kinds of intense, richly imagined tales, who knows where she’ll end up?”

Bergman continues to advance in the world of literature; her next book, a novel –The Exhibtion- is forthcoming. Bergman actively serves on the Board of Directors for the Governor’s Institutes of Vermont and helped launch the Bennington Young Writers Program in 2016.

She studied Anthropology at Wake Forest University and has graduate degrees from Duke University and Bennington College. She received fellowships from the Millay Colony for the Arts, Breadloaf, and the American Library in Paris. She was awarded the 2015 Garrett Award for Fiction from the Southern Fellowship of Writers, and was nominated for the Vermont Book Award in 2016.

“It is a pleasure to connect with a live audience and share my love of short fiction and sentences face-to-face,” says Megan Mayhew Bergman. “I relish the opportunity to talk about the short stories – to read them aloud and to talk about what they might accomplish artistically, and how one might begin to write them.”

Founded in 1867 by the Newark Conference of the United Methodist Church, Centenary University’s academic program integrates a solid liberal arts foundation with a strong career orientation. This mix is designed to provide an educational experience that prepares students to succeed in the increasingly global and interdependent world.

Centenary University’s main campus is located in Hackettstown, N.J., with its equestrian facility in Washington Township (Morris County). The Centenary University School of Professional Studies offers degree programs in two locations: Parsippany and Edison, and at corporate sites throughout New Jersey. The School of International Programs recruits international students for study at Centenary and Centenary students for study abroad.

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