Valley Writers Series
The Valley Writers Series exists to connect beginning writers with professional writers and to provide opportunities for enrichment to Linn-Benton students and the Linn-Benton community. Valley Writers sponsors writers of regional or national prominence to give presentations/readings each term. The Series purposes are to stimulate creative writing among area students, to enhance literary awareness in our community, and to encourage Oregon writers.
Please review the current program announcement below. All Valley Writers events are free and open to the public. If you have any questions about this event or have suggestions for future events, contact Lucette Wood at woodl@linnbenton.edu.
VALLEY WRITERS PROGRAM for SPRING 08Winter term, we were happy to welcome two regional writers, a writing coach coming to lead particpants in an interactive workshop and an acclaimed novelist who is releasing a new book this year. For Spring term we anxiously await three Oregon poets to help us celebrate April as national poetry month. Please see the details of these events below.
Readings with Novelist and Poet Ralph Salibury and Poet Ingrid Wendt
Wednesday, April 16th, from noon-12:50 and 1:00-1:50
Albany Campus, Fireside room
Born in Iowa of a Cherokee/Shawnee story-teller, singer father and a story-telling Irish American mother, Ralph Salisbury grew up hunting and trapping, for meat and pelts, and working on the family farm, which had no electricity or running water but was reachable by a dirt road. Now a Professor Emeritus at the University of Oregon, Salisbury is the author of three books of short fiction and nine books of poetry. A co-translator of two books by Sami (Lapp) poet Nils-Aslak Valkeapää, Salisbury’s many awards include a Rockefeller Foundation Residency in Bellagio, Italy; three Fulbright professorships; and an Amparts (USIS) lectureship in India. He and his wife, Ingrid Wendt, divide their time between Seal Rock and Eugene, Oregon.
Born and raised in Aurora, Illinois, Ingrid Wendt is the prizewinning author of five books of poems, two anthologies, a book-length teaching guide, numerous articles and reviews, and more than 200 poems in literary journals and anthologies. She has taught writing at all educational levels, including the MFA program of Antioch University Los Angeles; at teacher-training institutes throughout the United States and in Germany; and in hundreds of public school classrooms, grades K-12, in the States and abroad. Honors include the Oregon Book Award, the Yellowglen Prize, the Editions Prize, the Carolyn Kizer Award, the D.H. Lawrence Award, several pushcart nominations, and 3 Fulbright professorships to Germany.Ralph will read (from noon-12:50) selections from his published work and present a talk based on his experience as a Native American poet, fiction writer and story teller and on his co-translating Sami (Lapp) poetry. Ingrid will read (1:00-1:50) from and discuss the origins of her two newest prizewinning books of poems, Surgeonfish and The Angle of Sharpest Ascending, as well as from her new manuscript, Sanctuary: poems about family dynamics and our human condition. Both authors will leave time for questions from the audience.
Reading by Poet and Editor David Biespiel
Monday, April 21st, from 10:00-10:50.
Albany Campus, Fireside room
David Biespiel was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1964 and grew up in Houston, Texas. He has degrees from Boston University and the University of Maryland. The recipient of the Academy of American Poets Prize, the Individual Artist Award in Poetry from the Maryland Arts Council and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, Biespiel has taught at several colleges, most recently at Stanford University, as Director and Writer-in-Residence of The Attic Writers’ Workshop at Portland State University, and at Oregon State. He is a regular columnist on poetry for The Oregonian and his prose and poetry has appeared in American Poetry Review, The New York Times Book Review, Parnassus, Poetry, and The New Republic. His books of poetry include: Shattering Air (1996), Pilgrims & Beggars (2002), and Wild Civility (2003). He is currently the editor of Poetry Northwest magazine and lives in Portland, Oregon.
David will read from his newest collection of poetry and speak about the imaginative process in writing poems and the critical process in selecting poems for Poetry Northwest, one of the nation's most prestigious magazines devoted exclusively to poetry.
Launch Celebration for LBCC's Literary Ezine, Creative Highway.
Thursday, May 22nd, at noon.
Albany Campus, Fireside room
Please join us to celebrate the release of LBCC's second annual Literary Ezine, the Creative Highway. This launch will include readings by submittors, including poetry, fiction and interactive media presentations, and food in their honor. Contact Natalie Daley at 917-4573 for more information.
Mark your calendars and plan to join us this term!
