The Visiting Writers Series at Reed College

These are free events, where you get to listen to authors in a small auditorium, then hang out afterwards and chat with them. I've had the chance to meet some of my favorite authors through this (Chris Offutt), and actually share coffee and shoot the shit. It's a great service that the college provides, and many folks don't know about it.

Here is a copy of the latest email announcement, with contact information if you want to sign up for the email list yourself.

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VISITING WRITERS AT REED COLLEGE - 2008-09

Thursday, October 2nd. Psychology Building Auditorium, Room 105, 6:30 p.m.
ELISSA SCHAPPELL • PAULS TOUTONGHI
Elissa Schappell is the author of Use Me, a collection of ten related stories that explore the relationships between friends and family, betrayal and loyalty. A contributing editor to Vanity Fair, Schappell is a co-founder of the literary magazine, Tin House. She is a coeditor of the anthology The Friend Who Got Away. She received her MFA from the Creative Writing Program at New York University, has been a senior editor at The Paris Review, and has contributed to numerous magazines including GQ, Vogue, Bomb, Bookforum, and Spin.
Pauls Toutonghi was born in 1976 in Seattle, Washington. His fiction has appeared in Zoetrope: All-Story, One Story Magazine, The Boston Review, Glimmer Train, Book Magazine, Terminus, and other small
periodicals. He received a Pushcart Prize for his short story,
Regeneration, which appeared in The Boston Review in 2000. His first
novel, Red Weather, was published by Random House in 2006. It has been
translated into Latvian and German. His other writing has appeared in
Sports Illustrated, The Crab Creek Review, and The Yemen Observer. He is
a mongrel — half-Latvian and half-Egyptian. His earliest memories are
steeped in linguistic confusion. He received his MFA in poetry and his
Ph.D. in English literature from Cornell University. He now teaches at
Lewis & Clark College.

Thursday, October 30th. Psychology Building Auditorium, Room 105, 6:30 p.m.
MARIE HOWE
Marie Howe is the author of three volumes of poetry, The Good Thief, What the Living Do, The Kingdom of Ordinary Time, and is the coeditor of a book of essays, In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic. She is the recipient of a Lavan Younger Poets Prize from the American Academy of Poets, an NEA, a Guggenheim, and has been a fellow at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, Agni,
Ploughshares, Harvard Review, and The Partisan Review, among others.
Currently, Howe teaches creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College,
Columbia, and New York University.

Thursday, November 6th. Psychology Building Auditorium, Room 105, 6:30 p.m.
STEPHEN ELLIOTT • ALICE FULTON
Stephen Elliott is the author of six books including the story
collection My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up and the novel
Happy Birthday Baby, a finalist for the New York Public Library's Young
Lion Award, as well as named a Best Book of 2004 in Salon.com, Newsday,
Chicago New City, the Journal News, and the Village Voice. In addition
to writing fiction he frequently writes on politics. In 2004 he wrote a
book about the quest for the Democratic presidential nomination titled
Looking Forward To It. Elliott's writing has been featured in Esquire,
The New York Times, GQ, The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2005 &
2007, The Best American Erotica, and Best Sex Writing 2006. He is also
the editor of three collections of politically inspired fiction and the
founder of the Progressive Reading Series, which helps authors raise
money for and participate on behalf of progressive candidates and causes.
Alice Fulton’s first fiction collection, The Nightingales of Troy: Connected Stories, was published by W.W. Norton in July 2008. Her most recent book of poems is Cascade Experiment. Her poetry collection, Felt, was awarded the 2002 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress and was named by the L.A. Times as one of the Best Books of 2001. Her other books include Sensual Math; Powers of Congress; Palladium, winner of the 1985 National Poetry Series and the 1987 Society of Midland Authors Award; and Dance Script with Electric Ballerina, winner of the 1982 Associated Writing Programs Award. She has received fellowships from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Michigan Society of Fellows, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the National Endowment for the Arts, among many
others. She is the Ann S. Bowers Professor of English at Cornell University.

Thursday, November 20th. Psychology Building Auditorium, Room 105, 6:30
p.m.
C.S. GISCOMBE
C. S. Giscombe was born in Dayton, Ohio. His poetry books are
Postcards, Here, and Giscombe Road. His book of linked essays is Into
and Out of Dislocation. Reed students have written senior theses on his
books Here and Giscombe Road. His most recent book of poems, Prairie
Style, was just released. He is working on a prose book about trains and
train metaphors, Railroad Sense. His work appears in the anthologies
Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry, Lyric Postmodernisms, and
American Hybrid, among others. Gisombe has won a Carl Sandburg Award,
and has received grants from the NEA, the Illinois Arts Council, the
Fund for Poetry, and the Council for the International Exchange for
Scholars. Giscombe currently teaches at Berkeley and is a long distance
cyclist.

Thursday, March 12th. Psychology Building Auditorium, Room 105, 6:30 p.m.
SUSAN STRAIGHT
Susan Straight's novels include I Have Been in Sorrow’s Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots, Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights, The Gettin Place, and Highwire Moon, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her essays have appeared in Harper's, Salon.com, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, The New York Times, and on NPR's All Things Considered, as well as in women's magazines such as Real Simple and Family Circle. Her short stories have appeared in McSweeney's and Zoetrope, among other publications. Her honors and awards include the California Book Prize, a Lannan Foundation Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, and a Best American Short Story Award. Straight was born in Riverside and lives there with her three daughters.

Thursday, March 26th. Psychology Building Auditorium, Room 105, 6:30 p.m.
KATHERINE DUNN
Katherine Dunn is interested in extremes. One Ring Circus, a collection of her essays on the sport of boxing, will appear early in 2009. With photographer Jim Lommasson on the book Shadow Boxers, Dunn won the 2004 Lange-Taylor Documentary Prize. Her third novel, Geek Love, was a finalist for the 1989 National Book Award. Dunn was a member of the Reed class of 1968, but dropped out before graduating to travel and live in Central America and Europe. She has lived and worked for many years in Portland, Oregon.

Thursday, April 9th. Psychology Building Auditorium, Room 105, 6:30 p.m.
MATTHEW DICKMAN
Matthew Dickman’s first collection of poems, All American Poem, won the 2008 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize in Poetry, selected by Tony Hoagland. His chapbook, Amigos, was published in 2007 by Q Ave Press. Dickman’s poems appear in Tin House, Clackamas Literary Review, Agni Online, and The New Yorker, among others. A native of Portland, Oregon, he is the recipient of fellowships from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.


Contact kmb@reed.edu to be removed from the Visiting Writers at Reed
email list. Check out our webpage at http://web.reed.edu/visiting_writers



--
Karen M. Bondaruk
Faculty Assistant
Reed College
Vollum 320
3203 SE Woodstock Blvd.
Portland, OR 97202
503.777.7753 (voice)
503.777.7769 (fax - attn: KBondaruk)
kmb@reed.edu