Sponsored by the Garaventa Center
UP’s own Fr. Hannon, C.S.C., shares his experience from a recent pilgrimage on Spain’s Camino de Santiago, a meeting place for pilgrims for almost 1,100 years that leads to the shrine of the apostle James. His talk “Muscle as Metaphor: Reflections of a Pilgrimage” is part of the ReadUP program’s exploration of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild. Fr. Pat (who was Strayed’s student) has for decades taught at UP with a focus on the personal essay, narrative, memoir, and profile writing. He has published four collections of narrative essays (Such Dizzy Natural Happiness, 2023; Running into the Arms of God, 2005; Geography of God’s Mercy, 2007; The Long Yearning’s End, 2009), and one collection of personal essays (Sacrament: Personal Encounters with Memories, Wounds, Dreams, and Unruly Hearts, 2014). His essays have appeared in The Gold Man Review, Timberline Review, Notre Dame Magazine, Portland Magazine, The Utne Reader, and US Catholic.
Co-sponsored by the Dept. of Env. Studies
Erica Berry is a writer and teacher based in her hometown of Portland, Oregon. Her nonfiction book Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear won the 2024 Oregon Book Award. A contributing editor at Orion, her essays also appear in The Guardian, The New York Times, Outside, Aeon, Hazlitt, The Yale Review, The Atlantic, and others. Winner of the Steinberg Essay Prize and Kurt Brown Prize in Nonfiction, she has received grants and fellowships from the Ucross Foundation, Minnesota State Arts Board, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Literary Arts, and Tin House. A teacher of writing workshops at the Attic Institute, Literary Arts, the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, and the New York Times Student Journeys, she was the 2019-2020 National Writers’ Series Writer-in-Residence in Traverse City, Michigan. She received her MFA from the University of Minnesota in 2018. Read an excerpt of Wolfish here.
Q&A with the author on March 13, 4:05-5pm in DB 131: bring your questions!
Cheryl Strayed is the author of Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail (2012), which was made into an Oscar-nominated film. Her bestselling collection of Dear Sugar columns, Tiny Beautiful Things, was adapted for a Hulu television show and as a play that continues to be staged in theaters nationwide. Strayed's other books are the critically acclaimed novel, Torch, and the bestselling collection Brave Enough, which brings together more than 100 of her inspiring quotes. Her books have sold more than 5 million copies around the world and have been translated into forty languages. Strayed’s award-winning essays and short stories have been published in The Best American Essays, the New York Times, the Washington Post Magazine, Vogue, and elsewhere. She has also made two hit podcasts, Dear Sugars, which she co-hosted with Steve Almond, and Sugar Calling.
A longtime Portland fiction writer (and co-founder of a writing group that’s included fellow Portlander wordsmiths Strayed, Yuknavitch, Cain, and Palahniuk), Drake has written the 2006 novel Clown Girl (which comedian Kristen Wiig optioned for a film), The Stud Book (2013), and a collection of linked stories The Folly of Loving Life (2016). She has been published in Paris Review Daily, The Rumpus, Longreads, Gay Magazine, Oregon Humanities Magazine, The Stranger, and other publications, including anthologies. For 25 years, she has taught creative writing in workshops, academic programs, and one-on-one manuscript critiques. Monica Drake earned her MFA at the University of Arizona, and has taught for many years at the Pacific Northwest College of Art. Read an excerpt from The Folly of Loving Life here.
Additional poetry workshop opportunity (4:10-5pm in DB 202) – sign up by emailing larson@up.edu
Poet and Reed Professor Joan Naviyuk Kane is Inupiaq with family from Alaska’s Ugiuvak (King Island) and Qawiaraq (Mary’s Igloo). Kane is the author of many collections of poetry and prose: The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife, Hyperboreal, The Straits, Milk Black Carbon, Sublingual, A Few Lines in the Manifest, Another Bright Departure, Dark Traffic, and most recently Ex Machina. A graduate of Harvard and Columbia U (M.F.A.), her awards are many: a Guggenheim Fellow, Radcliffe Fellow, Native Arts and Cultures Foundation’s National Artist Fellow, Mellon Practitioner Fellow, Whiting Award, selected as a 2023-2026 Fulbright Specialist, and the 2023 Paul Engle Prize from the Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature. Her poetry and essays have appeared in Best American Poetry, The Norton Reader, The Guardian, Orion, The Hopkins Review, The Yale Review, The Slowdown, Poetry, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. She has held faculty appointments at Harvard, Tufts, and UMass Boston, Scripps College, and the Institute of American Indian Arts. Forthcoming in 2025 is her co-edited anthology, Circumpolar Connections: Creative Indigenous Geographies of the Arctic, as well as an essay collection, Passing Through Danger. www.thejoankane.com/
Informal classroom Q&A 4:30-5:30pm Dundon-Berchtold 134 – bring questions
Viet Thanh Nguyen is one of America’s most important fiction writer/memoirists. His novel The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and he earned the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Edgar Award for Best First Novel, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, the First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction, a Gold Medal in First Fiction from the California Book Awards, and the Asian/Pacific American Literature Award. His other books are his memoir A Man of Two Faces, the short-story collection The Refugees, The Committed (the sequel to The Sympathizer), National Book Award finalist Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War and Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America. He is a Professor at the University of Southern California, and has been the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations. Nguyen is the editor of The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives and the Library of America volume for Maxine Hong Kingston. This year HBO turned The Sympathizer into a TV series directed by Park Chan-wook. Nguyen’s last book was Simone, a children’s book illustrated by Minnie Phan, while his next book is To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other, forthcoming in 2025. https://vietnguyen.info/
Informal classroom Q&A 3-4pm in Franz 128 – bring questions
Mark Pomeroy is a U.P. alumnus who lives with his family in Portland, where he was born and raised. He has just published his second novel The Tigers of Lents (U. of Iowa Press). It is the moving story of an unwealthy Portland family whose teenagers navigate between instability and hope as they move on from high school. When the eldest, a promising soccer player, earns a scholarship to the University of Portland from its charismatic coach, this first-generation student faces years of self-doubt in this new identity for her family. Pomeroy published his first novel The Brightwood Stillness (Oregon State U. Press, 2014) which The Oregonian called “absorbing and humane.” He has received an Oregon Literary Fellowship for fiction, and his short stories, poems, and essays have appeared in Open Spaces, Portland Magazine, The Wordstock 10, NW Book Lovers, The Oregonian, and What Teaching Means: Stories from America’s Classrooms. For the past twenty-nine years he has led creative writing workshops in Portland schools. https://www.mpomeroy.com/
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