Visiting Writers Series 2009-2010

Welcome to the literary arts at OSU. All our events are free and open to the public, and followed by a book signing.

For current year information please visit the Visiting Writers Series 2010-2011.

John Larison, novelist and nonfiction writer

Friday October 2, 7:30 pm, the Journey Room, Memorial Union

Please join us in celebrating the publication of Northwest of Normal, the debut novel by MFA Program alum John Larison. John is the author of The Complete Steelheader and a frequent contributor to various outdoor publications, including Gray’s Sporting Journal and Fly Fisherman, where he serves as the Northwest Field Editor.

“Northwest of Normal is a skillfully told story about a place unraveling under the pressures of change and betrayal, about the cooptation of a landscape, river, and locality that is disturbingly emblematic of the contemporary Pacific Northwest.” –Ted Leeson.

Paula Bohince, poet
Friday, October 16, 2009, 7:30 pm
The Valley Library

Paula Bohince is the author of Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods (Sarabande Books 2008). Her poems appear widely in such publications as The New Yorker, Agni, Ploughshares, Slate, Southwest Review and the Yale Review. She has been the recipient of the “Discovery/The Nation Award and the Grolier Poetry Prize, among others. She received her MFA from New York University, and lives in Pennsylvania.

“…Paula Bohince carves beauty from the harsh complexities of suffering and survival, the chronic hardships and traumatic incidents woven in to the narratives of family and place…a remarkable debut.” –Claudia Emerson

Fady Joudah, poet
Friday, November 13, 2009, 7:30 pm
The Valley Library

Fady Joudah is the winner of the 2008 Yale Younger Poets Prize for his first book, The Earth in Our Attic. A Palestinian-American physician, he has been a field member of Doctors Without Borders since 2001, with recent missions to Zambia and Darfur-Sudan. He has also translated the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish in The Butterfly's Burden and If I Were Another.

Joudah’s visit is co-sponsored by the Hundere Endowment for Religion and Culture, as part of a new initiative in the Medical Humanities at OSU.

“These are small poems, many of them, but the grandeur of conception is inescapable. The Earth in the Attic is varied, coherent, fierce, tender, impossible to put down, impossible to forget.” –Louise Gluck.

Jess Walter, novelist
Friday, November 20, 2009, 7:30 pm
The Valley Library

Jess Walter is the author of five novels, including The Zero, a finalist for the 2006 National Book Award and Citizen Vince, winner of the 2005 Edgar Allan Poe Award for best novel. He has been a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize and the PEN USA Literary Prize in both fiction and nonfiction. His books have been New York Times, Washington Post and NPR best books of the year and have been translated into twenty languages.

"When it comes to explaining to me my own too often baffling nation, there's no one writing today whom I trust as completely as Jess Walter. His intelligence and sympathy and great wit inform every page--indeed every sentence--of his terrific new novel, The Financial Lives of the Poets." --Richard Russo, author of 'That Old Cape Magic'

Franklin Burroughs
Friday, February 5, 2010, 7:30 pm
The Valley Library

is an essayist and author of three highly praised volumes of nature writing, including Billy Watson’s Croker Sack, a Book of the Month Club “Editor’s Choice” selection, The River Home, and Confluence: Merrymeeting Bay. His stories and essays have appeared in many prestigious anthologies and magazines, including Best American Essays, Best American Short Stories, The Norton Anthology of Nature Writing, and Harper’s. Among his awards are the John Burroughs Medal (2008) and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. He was Harrison-McCann Professor of the English Language at Bowdoin College until his retirement in 2002.

Debra Spark
Friday, February 19, 2010, 7:30 pm
The Valley Library

Debra Spark is the author of three novels, including Good for the Jews, the 2009 winner of the University of Michigan Press Fiction Prize. Her previous books include the novels The Ghost of Bridgetown and Coconuts for the Saint, as well as Curious Attractions: Essays on Fiction Writing. She has been a fellow at Radcliffe College’s Bunting Institute and a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts award. Her short stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in such publications as Food and Wine, Esquire, and the New York Times. She is a professor at Colby College and teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

“Spark is at her sly, funny, and cutting best in her third novel, a clever and affecting variation on the biblical story of Esther…Spark’s canny novel of outsiders and insiders unveils many hard truths about the enigmas of the self and others in relationships both private and public.” --Booklist

Jane Hirshfield
Friday April 2, 7:30 pm
Location TBA

Jane Hirshfield is the author of six books of poetry, including Given Sugar, Given Salt (2001), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and her most recent collection, After, as well as a widely praised collection of essays on poetic understanding, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry.  She has also edited and co-translated The Ink Dark Moon, and edited Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women. Hirshfield’s many honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement by The Academy of American Poets.

Jane Hirshfield will be writer-in-residence for the Long-Term Ecological Reflections program at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest in advance of her Corvallis reading.  Her residency and reading are co-sponsored by the Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature, and the Written Word and the US Forest Service. 

Jennifer Richter

Friday April 16, 7:30 pm
The Valley Library

Jennifer Richter’s book Threshold was chosen by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey as the winner of the 2009 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition.  Richter’s work has appeared in The Missouri Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, Crab Orchard Review, CALYX, Cloudbank, and in the anthology A Fierce Brightness: Twenty-five Years of Women’s Poetry.  She is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University.  

“Threshold.  This one-word title leaves a hum in the brain.  It has an echo of foundation and lived truth.  And as one reads Jennifer Richter's solid collection, one also realizes that the title seems to be a signifier in how to approach this body of work.  Each poem is intensely believable because there isn't a decorous flare of language here.  The head isn't in the air, both feet are on the ground, and the collection sparkles with a shaped brilliance.  In other words, to cross the threshold is to (pro)claim the metaphysical that resides in the everyday.”

--Yusef Komunyakaa, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry

Lightsey Darst

Friday May 14, 7:30 pm
The Valley Library

Sharp-edged and suspenseful, Lightsey Darst’s debut collection of poems, Find the Girl (Coffee House Press, 2010), is an unyielding investigation of girlhood, voyeurism, and the CSI industry. Troubled by society’s obsession with missing and exploited girls, the book evokes historical characters from Snow White and Helen of Troy to contemporary figures like JonBenét in order to reconsider the voices of young women who were “more than victims.” A graduate of the University of Minnesota’s MFA program, Darst lives in Minneapolis, where she works as a writing instructor, arts critic, dancer, and curator of a writers’ salon. Her poems have appeared in Antioch Review, Diagram, Gulf Coast, Monkey Bicycle, New Letters, among other journals, and they were recently awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. 

“Bluegrass and teen lust, the sequels to horror films and the modernist fragment, perennial myth and murder mystery, all erupt into Lightsey Darst’s serious poems. . . . Playing hooky, playing dead, playing ‘an instrument built from her body,’ Darst is playing with fire: her verse lights up the night sky.”
—Stephen Burt, Author of Parallel Play and Close Calls with Nonsense