Evening Readings 2019

Jennifer Elise Foerster received her PhD in English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver, her MFA from the Vermont College of the Fine Arts, and is an alumna of the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA). She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Writing Residency Fellowship, and was a Robert Frost Fellow in Poetry at the Breadloaf Writers Conference and a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. In addition to teaching in The Rainier Writing Workshop, Jennifer teaches in the IAIA MFA Creative Writing Program and currently serves as its Interim Director. Jennifer also co-directs, with the poet Joy Harjo, an arts mentorship program for Mvskoke youth in Oklahoma, and is a Project Director with the non-profit organization InnerCHANGE WORKS. She is the author of two books of poetry, Leaving Tulsa (2013) and Bright Raft in the Afterweather (2018), both published by the University of Arizona Press. Foerster is of German, Dutch, and Mvskoke descent, is a member of the Mvskoke (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma, and lives in San Francisco.

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.

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 Beloit Poetry Journal, Fifth Wednesday, and Los Angeles Review of Books. His poetry collection Cellar Testament won the 2018 Rachel Wetszteon Chapbook Award from William Paterson University. An electric guitarist as well as a writer, he has collaborated with the classical composer Garrett Shatzer on an extensive blues-influenced piece in the art song tradition, At the Blinds. A past Director of Creative Writing at The College of Santa Fe and a former Richard Hugo Visiting Writer at The University of Montana, he teaches at UC Davis and in the low-residency MFA Program at Pacific Lutheran University.

April Ayers Lawson is the author of Virgin and Other Stories, which was named a Best Book Of The Year by The Irish Times and Vice, and a Best Foreign Book of the Year by Spain’s Qué Leer Magazine. Virgin and Other Stories has been (or will be) translated into German, Spanish, Norwegian, and Italian. She has received The Plimpton Prize for Fiction, as well as a writing fellowship from The Corporation of Yaddo. Her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, Die Welt, ZYZZYVA, and Oxford American, among others, has been cited as notable in Best American Short Stories, featured by Huffington Post, and anthologized in The Unprofessionals: New American Writing from The Paris Review. Her nonfiction has appeared in Der Spiegel, Granta, Vice, and Neue Zürcher Zeitung Magazine, and been named a Most Popular Read of the Year by Granta. She has taught in the creative writing programs at Emory University and the University Of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and now teaches at Clemson University.

Jenny Johnson is the author of In Full Velvet (Sarabande Books, 2017). Her poems have appeared in The New York Times, Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, Waxwing, and elsewhere. Her honors include a Whiting Award, a Hodder Fellowship, and an NEA Fellowship. She has also received awards and scholarships from the Blue Mountain Center, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Yaddo. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at West Virginia University, and she is on the faculty of the Rainier Writing Workshop, Pacific Lutheran University’s low-residency MFA program. She lives in Pittsburgh, PA.

Renee Simms received her MFA from Arizona State University, a JD from Wayne State University Law School, and a BA from University of Michigan. She is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, was a John Gardner Fiction Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and received fellowships from Ragdale and Vermont Studio Center. In addition to teaching in the Rainier Writing Workshop, Renee teaches at University of Puget Sound, where she is an associate professor of African American Studies and contributing faculty to English. Renee’s debut story collection Meet Behind Mars was a Foreword Indies Finalist for Short Stories and listed by The Root as one of 28 brilliant books by black authors in 2018. Renee is currently at work on a novel and a collection of linked essays.

Adrianne Harun is the award-winning author of two short story collections, The King of Limbo (Houghton Mifflin) and Catch, Release (Johns Hopkins University Press) and a novel, A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain (Viking Penguin), which won the 2015 Pinckley Prize for Debut Crime Fiction. Her stories have been listed as notable in Best American Short Stories and Best American Mystery Stories, and her books have been shortlisted for the Washington State Book Award, Pacific Northwest Bookseller’s Association Award, International Dublin Literary Award, Eric Hoffer Award, and Foreword Indies. Adrianne has also been the recipient of several fellowships and grants, most recently, a 2015 Civitella Ranieri Fellowship.

Keetje Kuipers is the author of three books of poems, including Beautiful in the Mouth (BOA, 2010), winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and a Poetry Foundation bestseller. Her second collection, The Keys to the Jail (2014), was a book club pick for The Rumpus, and her third book, All Its Charms (2019), includes poems honored by publication in both The Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. Her poetry and prose have appeared in Narrative, Tin House, Virginia Quarterly Review, The New York Times Magazine, American Poetry Review, Orion, The Believer, and over a hundred other magazines. Her poems have also been featured as part of the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series and read on NPR’s Writer’s Almanac. Kuipers has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, a Bread Loaf fellow, and the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident. She now teaches at Seattle’s Hugo House and serves as Senior Editor at Poetry Northwest.

Fleda Brown’s The Woods Are On Fire: New & Selected Poems was chosen by Ted Kooser for his University of Nebraska poetry series in 2017. She has nine previous collections of poems. Her work has twice appeared in The Best American Poetry (with a third time upcoming) 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 directed the Poets in the Schools program. She was poet laureate of Delaware from 2001-07. She lives with her husband, Jerry Beasley, in Traverse City, Michigan.

David Allan Cates is the author of five novels, most recently Tom Connor’s Gift, a gold medalist in the 2015 Independent Book Publishers Book awards. His chapbook of poetry, The Mysterious Location of Kyrgyzstan, was released in the spring, 2016. His other novels include: Hunger in America, a New York Times Notable Book, X Out of Wonderland, and Freeman Walker, both Montana Book Award Honor Books, and Ben Armstrong’s Strange Trip Home, a gold medalist in the 2013 Independent Book Publishers Book Awards. The winner of the Montana Arts Council’s Artist Innovation Award in 2010, his stories and poems have appeared in numerous literary magazines, and his travel articles in Outside Magazine and the New York Times Sophisticated Traveler. For 18 years, Cates was the executive director of Missoula Medical Aid, a non-profit that provides public health and surgery services in Honduras. In Missoula he has worked with the Missoula Writing Collaborative, teaching classes on short story writing in high schools, and the 406 writing workshop. For many years he worked as a fishing guide on the Smith River and raised cattle on his family farm in Wisconsin.

Kent Meyers is the author of a memoir, a book of short fiction, and three novels, most recently Twisted Tree, which won a Society of Midland Authors award and a High Plains Book award, and was translated into French. The River Warren and Light In the Crossing were New York Times Notable Books, and The Work Of Wolves won the Mountain and Plains Booksellers Association Award and an American Library Association Award. Meyers has published fiction and essays in numerous literary journals. He recently retired from many years of teaching at Black Hills State University in South Dakota.

Carl Phillips is the author of fourteen books of poetry, most recently Wild Is the Wind (FSG, 2018), and Reconnaissance (FSG, 2015), winner of the PEN USA Award and the Lambda Literary Award. He is also the author of two books of prose: The Art of Daring: Risk, Restlessness, Imagination (Graywolf, 2014) and Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Life and Art of Poetry (Graywolf, 2004), and he is the translator of Sophocles’ Philoctetes (Oxford, 2004). A four-time finalist for the National Book Award, his honors include the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry, the Kingsley Tufts Award, the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, and the Academy of American Poets. He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

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

Lia Purpura is the author of eight collections of essays, poems, and translations, most recently, Rough Likeness (essays) and It Shouldn’t Have Been Beautiful (poems). Her honors include a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist, National Endowment for the Arts and Fulbright Fellowships, four Pushcart prizes, the Associated Writing Programs Award in Nonfiction, and the Beatrice Hawley, and Ohio State University Press awards in poetry. Recent work appears in Agni, Field, The Georgia Review, Orion, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Best American Essays. She is Writer in Residence at The University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and teaches in prisons in Baltimore and at writing programs around the country. In early 2019, her new collection of essays, All the Fierce Tethers, was published by Sarabande Books.

Peggy Shumaker’s new and selected volume Cairn was recently published by Red Hen Press. She was honored by the Rasmuson Foundation with its Distinguished Artist Award, and by the National Endowment on the Arts with a fellowship in poetry. She served as Alaska State Writer Laureate. Shumaker is the author of eight books of poetry. Her lyrical memoir is Just Breathe Normally. Professor emerita from University of Alaska Fairbanks, Shumaker teaches in the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA at PLU. She serves on the Advisory Board for Storyknife and on the board of the Alaska Arts and Culture Foundation. Shumaker is editor of the Boreal Books series (an imprint of Red Hen Press), editor of the Alaska Literary Series at University of Alaska Press, contributing editor for Alaska Quarterly Review, and poetry editor for Persimmon Tree.