Desperately Seeking Salem

If you’re active in the Willamette bubble, you may have heard that local fiction writer,  Scott Nadelson, who had a great essay in the most recent Oregon Humanities magazine, recently became the Hallie Ford Chair in Writing in the English Department.

Nadelson is one of those people here in town who are assuring that Salem achieves the robust literary culture that it deserves.

One of his first tasks as chair? To put together a roster of must-see, have-to-genuflect-before visiting writers who are speaking on campus this fall.

I do hope they get him a good seat for hosting these talks.

All events will take place at 7 p.m. in the Hatfield Room of Willamette’s Mark O. Hatfield Library, and all are free and open to the public.

September 30: An Evening with Fiction Writer Manuel Muñoz.

• Muñoz, who writes about Chicano/a communities in California’s Central Valley, is the author of two collections of short stories: Zigzagger (Northwestern University Press, 2003) and The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2007). He has received pretty much every distinction out there that you can get for short story writing, including the 2008 Whiting Writers’ Award and a 2009 PEN/O. Henry Award for his story “Tell Him About Brother John.”

October 12: The Art of Playwriting with Andrea Stolowitz.

• Stolowitz is a graduate of the MFA playwriting program at the University of California San Diego and is currently teaching at Willamette. With names like TALES OF DOOMED LOVE and BAD FAMILY, you can bet she writes the kind of approachable, funny stuff for the stage.

December 1: New Voices Showcase: Poet Keetje Kuipers & Fiction Writer Elissa Minor Rust.

• Kuipers is a native of the Northwest.  She earned her B.A. at Swarthmore College and her M.F.A. at the University of Oregon.  In 2007 she completed her tenure as the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident, which provided her with seven months of solitude in Oregon’s Rogue River Valley.  She used her time there to complete work on her book, Beautiful in the Mouth, which was awarded the 2009 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and was published in March 2010 by BOA Editions.

(ok, kind of jealous after typing out that one…)

• Rust lives and works in Portland, Oregon and is proud to call herself a Northwest writer. She teaches writing and literature at Portland Community College, and publishes fiction and nonfiction in national literary magazines and anthologies. Her short story collection, The Prisoner Pear: Stories From the Lake, was published in December 2005 by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press and was a New York Times Editor’s Choice pick.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 29th, 2010 at 4:08 pm and is filed under Books, You are what you read. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.