Literary Northwest Series

The Literary Northwest Series

Bill Porter & Eric Paul Shaffer
Friday, January 27
7:30PM
Memorial Union Journey Room

Bill Porter is a poet and translator well known for his work with Buddhist texts. His translations have been honored with a number of awards including two NEA translation fellowships, a PEN translation award, the inaugural Asian Literature Award of the American Literary Translators Association, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. After living for many years in Taiwan and Hong Kong, he now lives and writes in Port Townsend, Washington.

Eric Paul Shaffer is author of five books of poetry including Lāhaina Noon and Portable Planet. His poetry is published in North American Review, Slate, Ploughshares, and The Sun, as well as internationally in Island and Quadrant, Dalhousie Review, Fiddlehead, Poetry Ireland Review, Southword Journal, Poetry New Zealand, and Takahe. Shaffer received the 2002 Elliot Cades Award for Literature, a 2006 Ka Palapala Po‘okela Book Award for Lāhaina Noon, and the 2009 James M. Vaughan Award for Poetry. He lives on O‘ahu and teaches at Honolulu Community College.

Ana Maria Spagna
Friday, April 13
7:30 PM
Corvallis-Benton County Public Library, The Main Meeting Room

Ana Maria Spagna is the author of Potluck: Community on the Edge of Wilderness, Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus: A Daughter’s Civil Rights Journey, winner of the 2009 River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Contest, and Now Go Home: Wilderness, Belonging, and the Crosscut Saw, named a best book of 2004 by The Seattle Times. Her writing is widely published in journals and magazines, including High Country News, Mountain Gazette, Oregon Quarterly, Orion, and Utne Reader. She lives in Stehekin, Washington.

Co-sponsors: Friends of the Corvallis-Benton County Public Library, OSU Press, and Grass Roots Books and Music

Geri Doran & Maxine Scates
Friday, April 20
7:30 PM
Memorial Union 208, La Raza Room

Geri Doran is the author of Resin (LSU, 2005), selected by Henri Cole for the Academy of American Poets’ Walt Whitman Award, and Sanderlings (Tupelo, 2011). She has received the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and Portland’s Literary Arts. Born in northwestern Montana, she holds degrees from Vassar College and the University of Florida and currently teaches poetry in the University of Oregon’s Creative Writing Program.

Maxine Scates is the author of three books of poetry, Undone (New Issues, 2011), Toluca Street, and Black Loam. She is coeditor, with David Trinidad, of Holding Our Own: The Selected Poems of Ann Stanford. Her poems have been widely published in such journals as AGNI, The American Poetry Review, Ironwood, The Massachusetts Review, Ploughshares and The Virginia Quarterly Review, and her work has received the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, the Oregon Book Award for Poetry, the Lyre Prize, and a Pushcart Prize. She has taught at Lane Community College, Lewis and Clark College and most recently Reed College. She lives in Eugene, Oregon.

Aria Minu-Sepehr
Friday, April 27
7:30 PM
Valley Library Rotunda

Following the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979 and the purges that targeted the author’s class, Aria Minu-Sepehr sought refuge in the United States. The hostage crisis, a year later, would prove that the edicts of the Iranian Revolution could impact the global community and destroy the goodwill of one people for another. Aria Minu-Sepehr has worked to bridge that divide. He has lectured on issues concerning Iranian culture and U.S. foreign policy, and created and directed Forum for Middle East Awareness at Susquehanna University, where he also taught world and Middle Eastern literature. In 2007, an excerpt of We Heard the Heavens Then was awarded the John Guyon Literary Non-Fiction Prize.