Evening Readings 2017

Jenny Johnson is the author of In Full Velvet, published by Sarabande Books in 2017. Her many honors include a 2015 Whiting Award and a 2016-17 Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University. She has also received awards and scholarships from the Blue Mountain Center, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She received her MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry 2012, New England Review, Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, and elsewhere. She teaches at the University of Pittsburgh and at the Rainier Writing Workshop, Pacific Lutheran University’s low-residency MFA program.

Oliver de la Paz is the author of four collections of poetry: Names Above Houses, Furious Lullaby, Requiem for the Orchard, and Post Subject: A Fable. He co-edited A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry, and serves as the co-chair of the Kundiman advisory board. His work has been published or is forthcoming in journals such as American Poetry Review, Tin House, The Southern Review, and Poetry Northwest. He teaches at the College of the Holy Cross and in the Low-Res MFA Program at PLU.

Greg Glazner’s books of poetry are From the Iron Chair and Singularity, both published by W.W. Norton. His awards include The Walt Whitman Award, The Bess Hokin Award from Poetry, and an NEA Fellowship. He has published recent poetry, fiction, and non-fiction in magazines including Poetry, Fifth Wednesday, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. An electric guitarist as well as a writer, he has collaborated with the composer Garrett Shatzer on a blues-influenced piece in the art song tradition, At the Blinds, for which Greg wrote the text. Sung by the tenor David Saul Lee and accompanied by CityWater New Music Ensemble, with Greg on guitar, the piece premiered in November of 2014 at the Center for New Music in San Francisco and was recorded live. When he’s not teaching at PLU or at UC Davis, he lives in Creede, Colorado with his partner, the writer Pam Houston.

Rigoberto González is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Unpeopled Eden, which won the Lambda Literary Award and the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and eleven books of prose, including Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa, which received the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. The recipient of Guggenheim, NEA and USA Rolón fellowships, a NYFA grant in poetry, the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, The Poetry Center Book Award, and the Barnes & Noble Writer for Writers Award, he is contributing editor for Poets & Writers Magazine and writes a monthly column for NBC-Latino online. Currently, he is professor of English at Rutgers-Newark, the State University of New Jersey, and the inaugural Stan Rubin Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the Rainier Writing Workshop. In 2015, he received The Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Publishing Triangle. As of 2016, he serves as critic-at-large with the L.A. Times and sits on the Board of Trustees of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP).

April Ayers Lawson is the author of Virgin and Other Stories (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; and Granta Books), which in addition to being named a best book of the year by Vice, BOMB, Southern Living, and Refinery29 is also being translated for publication in Italy, Germany, Norway, and Spain. She has received the George Plimpton Award for Fiction, as well as a writing fellowship from The Corporation of Yaddo. Her fiction has appeared in Paris Review, Granta, and Oxford American, among others, has been cited as notable in Best American Short Stories, and was anthologized in The Unprofessionals: New American Writing from The Paris Review. She has lectured in the creative writing department at Emory University, and is the 2016-17 Kenan Visiting Writer at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Brenda Miller is the author of five essay collections: An Earlier Life; Who You Will Become; Listening Against the Stone; Blessing of the Animals; and Season of the Body. She also co-authored Tell It Slant: Creating, Refining and Publishing Creative Nonfiction and The Pen and The Bell: Mindful Writing in a Busy World. Her work has received six Pushcart Prizes. She is a Professor of English at Western Washington University, and on the faculty of the Rainier Writing Workshop. She lives in Bellingham, WA, with her dog Abbe and a rotating crew of foster dogs who take up temporary residence. Her website is www.brendamillerwriter.com.

Jason Skipper’s debut novel Hustle was a finalist for the PEN Center USA Award for Fiction. His work has appeared in Hotel Amerika, Mid-American Review, and South Writ Large, and he has received awards and recognition from Zoetrope: All-Story, Glimmer Train, and Crab Orchard Review. He teaches at Pacific Lutheran University.

Barrie Jean Borich’s latest title is Apocalypse, Darling, a lyric narrative forthcoming in February 2018 from Ohio State University Press, the kickoff book in Machete: The Ohio State Series in Literary Nonfiction. She is the author of Body Geographic (University of Nebraska Press/American Lives Series), winner of a Lambda Literary Award in Memoir, an IPPY (Independent Publisher Book Award) Gold Medal in Essay/Creative Nonfiction and a 2013 IndieFab Bronze Award for Essays. In a starred review Kirkus called Body Geographic “an elegant literary map that celebrates shifting topographies as well as human bodies in motion, not only across water and land, but also through life.” Borich’s previous book, My Lesbian Husband (Graywolf), won the American Library Association Stonewall Book Award. Her work has been anthologized in Waveform: Twenty-First Century Essays by Women and in After Montaigne: Contemporary Essayists Cover the Essays, and has been cited in Best American Essays and Best American Non-Required Reading. She is the recipient of The Florida Review Editor’s Prize in the Essay and the Crab Orchard Review Literary Nonfiction Prize, and her work has appeared in Ecotone, The Seneca Review, Indiana Review, Hotel Amerika, TriQuarterly, Passages North, The Washington Post, and The Rumpus. Borich is an associate professor in the English Department and MA in Writing and Publishing Program at DePaul University in Chicago. She leads writing workshops for graduate and undergraduate students at DePaul, teaches courses in LGBTQ memoir and the history and practice of the American literary magazine, and she edits Slag Glass City, a digital journal of the urban essay arts. A Chicago native, Borich lives with her spouse Linnea in the city’s historic Bryn Mawr District of the Edgewater Beach neighborhood, one of the most culturally and internationally diverse community areas of the city and few blocks south of the condo where the fictional characters Bob and Emily Hartley of the Bob Newhart show resided.

Fleda Brown has published nine collections of poems. The Woods Are On Fire: New & Selected Poems was published in 2017 by the University of Nebraska Press. The book is in the Ted Kooser Contemporary Poetry Series. Her work has twice appeared in The Best American Poetry and has won a Pushcart Prize, the Felix Pollak Prize, the Philip Levine Prize, and the Great Lakes Colleges New Writer’s Award, and has twice been a finalist for the National Poetry Series. Her memoir, Driving With Dvorak, was published in 2010 by the University of Nebraska Press. She is professor emerita at the University of Delaware, where she taught for 27 years and directed the Poets in the Schools program. She was poet laureate of Delaware from 2001-07. She now lives with her husband, Jerry Beasley, in Traverse City, Michigan.

Camille T. Dungy is the author of four collections of poetry: Trophic Cascade (Wesleyan UP, 2017), Smith Blue (Southern Illinois UP, 2011), Suck on the Marrow (Red Hen Press, 2010), and What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison (Red Hen Press, 2006). Her debut collection of personal essays is Guidebook to Relative Strangers (W. W. Norton, 2017). Dungy edited Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (UGA, 2009), and co-edited the From the Fishouse poetry anthology (Persea, 2009). Her honors include an American Book Award, two Northern California Book Awards, a California Book Award silver medal, and a fellowship from the NEA. Dungy is currently a Professor in the English Department at Colorado State University.

David Biespiel is a contributing writer at The Rumpus, Partisan, American Poetry Review, Politico, New Republic, Slate, Poetry, and The New York Times, among other publications. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, most recently Charming Gardeners and The Book of Men and Women, which was chosen one of the Best Books of the Year by the Poetry Foundation and received the Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry. His books of essays include A Long High Whistle: Selected Columns on Poetry and a book on creativity, Every Writer Has a Thousand Faces. He is a member of the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle. Recipient of Lannan, National Endowment for the Arts, and Stegner fellowships, he has taught at Stanford University, University of Maryland, George Washington University, Portland State University, and Wake Forest University, in addition to other colleges and universities. He is a longtime faculty member in the School of Writing, Literature, and Film at Oregon State University and is the founder of the Attic Institute of Arts and Letters in Portland.

Ann Pancake is the author of two short story collections, Given Ground and Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley, and a novel, Strange As This Weather Has Been, which was one of Kirkus Review’s Top Ten Fiction Books of the year, won the 2007 Weatherford Prize, and was a finalist for the 2008 Orion Book Award and the 2008 Washington State Book Award. She has also received a Whiting Award, an NEA grant, the Bakeless Prize, and a Pushcart Prize. Fiction and essays have appeared in journals and anthologies like Orion, The Georgia Review, Poets and Writers, and New Stories from the South, the Year’s Best. In 2016, she was the first recipient of the Barry Lopez Visiting Writer in Ethics and the Community Fellowship. She has a PhD in English literature from the University of Washington and was the Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, in Spring 2017.