English: 2012-13 Readings and Lecture Series

Fall 2012

Anna Keesey - novelist - Tuesday, October 2, 2012, 7:30 p.m., BC 163. Keesey is a graduate of Stanford University and the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Her novel Little Century, set in central Oregon at the turn of the 20th century, was published to much acclaim this summer by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Her work has appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including Best American Short Stories.  She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship and has held residencies at MacDowell, Bread Loaf, Yaddo, and Provincetown.  Keesey teaches English and creative writing at Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon.

Kathleen Dean Moore - Schoenfeldt Visiting Writer - Monday, October 29, 2012, 7:00 p.m., Mago Hunt Recital Hall. Essayist, philosopher, and environmental activist Kathleen Dean Moore is the author of several collections of essays, among them Riverwalking and Holdfast; she is also the editor of Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril, which gathers pieces by a hundred folks (religious leaders, scientists, poets, business leaders, activists, philosophers, etc.) talking about individual and collective moral responsibilities to the planet. “The essays in this book … are a clear call to action,” said Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa. Moore is a professor of philosophy at Oregon State University; among her many awards and honors is the Oregon Book Award, for her book The Pine Island Paradox.

Wayne Miller - poet and editor - Monday, November 12, 2012, 7:30 p.m., BC 163. Miller is the author of three poetry collections: The City, Our City (Milkweed, 2011)—which was a finalist for the William Carlos Williams Award and the Rilke Prize—The Book of Props (2009), and Only the Senses Sleep (New Issues, 2006). He also translated Moikom Zeqo's I Don't Believe in Ghosts (BOA, 2007) and co-edited both New European Poets (Graywolf, 2008) and Tamura Ryuichi: On the Life & Work of a 20th Century Master (Pleiades Unsung Masters, 2011). The recipient of six Poetry Society of America Awards, the Bess Hokin Prize, and a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, Wayne lives in Kansas City and teaches at the University of Central Missouri, where he edits Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing (& Reviews). In 2013 he will be the Fulbright Distinguished Scholar of Creative Writing at Queen's University, Belfast.

Spring 2013

Lois Leveen - novelist - Thursday, March 21, 2013, 7:30 p.m., BC 163.  Leveen is a Portland-based author and performer.  Her work has appeared in numerous literary magazines, the New York Times, onstage at PerformanceWorks Northwest and NPR's LiveWire, and in film festivals around the country.  Her first novel, The Secrets of Mary Bowser (HarperCollins/William Morrow), is based on the true story of a free black woman who became a spy for the Union Army during the Civil War--by pretending to be a slave to the family of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. A former faculty member at UCLA and Reed College, Leveen gives talks and leads classes at museums, libraries, and schools throughout the country.

Jamaica Kincaid - Schoenfeldt Visiting Writer - Thursday, April 4, 2013, 7:30 p.m., Buckley Center Auditorium. Writer, novelist, and professor Jamaica Kincaid skillfully and elegantly tempers the boundary between poetry and prose. Kincaid’s literary “voice” is deeply rooted in her experiences as a child in her native Antigua.  Her first book, At the Bottom of the River, won the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Her award-winning book, A Small Place, inspired the 2001 documentary, Life and Debt, about the impact globalization can have on a developing country. Her 2005 book, Among Flowers: A Walk In The Himalayas chronicles her adventure into the mountains of Nepal with a group of botanists. Kincaid’s new novel, See Now Then, will be published on February 5, 2013. The Josephine Olp Weeks Chair and Professor of Literature at Claremont McKenna College, Kincaid was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2004 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009.  She has won the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, Prix Femina Étranger, Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and the Clifton Fadiman Medal.

James Longenbach - poet and critic - Monday, April 8, 2013, 7:30 p.m., BC 163. Longenbach is the author of four books of poems, most recently The Iron Key (Norton), and five books of literary criticism, most recently The Art of the Poetic Line (Graywolf). A new critical book, The Virtues of Poetry, will be published by Graywolf next year. Longenbach's poems have appeared in many magazines, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The New Republic, and he regularly reviews contemporary poetry for The Nation and the New York Times Book Review. A frequent faculty member at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and the Warren Wilson MFA Program, he is the Joseph H. Gilmore Professor of English at the University of Rochester.

Cindy Weinstein - scholar and critic - Saturday, April 13, 2013, NUCL keynote speaker. Weinstein is a Professor of English and Executive Office for the Humanities at California Institute of Technology.  Dr. Weinstein is the author of six books on American literature and culture, including American Literature's Aesthetic Dimension, co-edited with Christopher Looby (Columbia University Press, 2012), Introduction to the Oxford Classical Edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (Oxford University Press), The Concise Companion to American Literature, 1900-1950, co-edited and co-written introduction with Peter Stoneley (Blackwell Press, 2008), Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Cambridge University Press (December 2004), The Cambridge Companion to Harriet Beecher Stowe, editor. Cambridge University Press (2004), and The Literature of Labor and the Labors of Literature: Allegory in NineteenthCentury American Fiction, Cambridge University Press (1995).