Clark Blaise and Bharati Mukherjee address, in their fiction and their collaborative non-fiction, the borders of the multicultural experience in our contemporary world.

Bharati Mukherjee, born in Calcutta, India, is the author of nine books, including the story collection The Middleman and Other Stories, winner of the 1988 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, and the novels Jasmin and The Holder of the World. Her stories and essays appear in most major anthologies.

Clark Blaise, a Canadian-American writer, is the author of ten books, including the critically acclaimed short story collections A North American Education and Tribal Justice, the novel Lunar Attractions and the post-modern autobiography I Had A Father. More than seventy of his short stories and essays appear in anthologies.

Clark Blaise and Bharati Mukherjee met while graduate students at the University of Iowa's Writers Workshop in the early 1960s. Written jointly, Days and Nights in Calcutta is the story of their first visit to India to visit her family after their marriage. Newsweek praised the "honesty, turned by Mukherjee and Blaise upon themselves and their surroundings, that makes this book so distinctive and affecting a chronicle of voyages and discoveries." Their second non-fiction book, The Sorrow and The Terror, is an investigative journalist account of the Air-India bombing of the 1980s.

Cosponsored by: Office of the Chancellor, Office of the Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and the Graduate College, Office of the Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs, The Council of Deans, The Center for Advanced Study, George A. Miller Endowment, George A. Miller Committee, Peggy Harris Memorial Fund, Department of English, Creative Writing Program, and the Robert J. Carr Visiting Authors Fund, International Programs and Studies, Program in South and West Asian Studies, Program for the Study of Cultural Values and Ethics, Women's Studies Program, Krannert Art Museum and Kinkead Museum, LAS/Humanities Council, University Library/Friends of the Library