GLO's Reading Series Bulletin!

Graduate Literary Organization
Winter & Spring 2009 Reading Series

Poets Zachary Schomburg and Matthew Dickman
Tuesday, February 24th SMU 238, 7 - 9 p.m.
Q & A following the readings

Zachary Schomburg: Portland local Zachary Schomburg is known for recent publications The Man Suit (Black Ocean, 2007); Abaraham Lincoln's Death Scene (Horse Less Press, 2007); The Truth about Canada (Big Game Books, 2007); and The Ottoman Empire (Universal Remote 2006). His forthcoming books include I Am a Small Boy (Factory Hollow); The Pond (Greying Ghost Press); and Scary, No Scary (Black Ocean). He also edits the online poetry magazine Octopus.

"Schomburg has encapsulated modern life in just one hundred or so pages. The bizarre imagination that spirals through the poems wonders, creates, and feeds upon itself." -- D. Richard Scannell, Bookslut.com

Matthew Dickman: Portland native Matthew Dickman's work has been published in Tin House, Clackamas Literary Review, Poet Lore, Rhino, Agni: online, and more. He has received fellowships and/or residencies from Oregon Literary Arts, the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas, the Breadloaf Writers Conference, the Vermont Studio Center and the Fine Arts Work Center. Dickman's first collection of poetry, All American Poem, won the 2008 APR/Honickman Prize, selected by Tony Hoagland, and will be published with Copper Canyon Press.

It is [Matthew Dickman's] artfulness and large spirit, telescoping without sentimentality the single outlook of a speaker who has escaped such conditions and now looks back, as bluesy as such projects go, that gives his poems a universality of feeling, an expressive lyricism of reflection, and heartrending allure. --Major Jackson, Boston Review

Poet D. A. Powell
Wednesday, March 4th, SMU 238 7 - 9 pm
Q & A following reading

D. A. Powell's most recent book is Chronic (Graywolf, 2009). His previous books include Tea, Lunch and Cocktails, which was a finalist for the Lambda, PENWest and National Book Critics Circle Awards. Powell has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the James Michener Foundation, a Pushcart Prize and the Lyric Poetry Award from the Poetry Society of America. He teaches in the English Department at the University of San Francisco.

"Mr. Powell recognizes in the contemporary the latest manifestations of a much older tradition: namely, what it is to be human." --Carl Phillips, Boston Review

Poets Andrew Michael Roberts & Endi Bogue Hartigan
Tuesday March 10th, SMU 238, 7 - 9 pm

Andrew Michael Roberts Portland local Roberts is the author of Give Up, a chapbook from Tarpaulin Sky Press, and the forthcoming Something Has to Happen Next, which won the Iowa Poetry Prize. He earned his MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he was a Juniper Fellow and received the Distinguished Teaching award. His work can be found in journals such as Tin House, Iowa Review, LIT, Quick Fiction, Mississippi Review, and Gulf Coast.

About Something Has to Happen Next: "Concise, always surprising, these poems take you on journeys into other worlds. They break icicles from your eyes, and say, 'look at me, you've never seen me before."—James Tate, author, The Ghost Soldiers

Endi Bogue Hartigan’s first book One Sun Storm was selected for the 2008 Colorado Prize for Poetry, judged by poet Martha Ronk. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Chicago Review, Pleiades, Free Verse, Quarterly West, Tinfish, New Orleans Review, The Antioch Review, Northwest Review, as well as other publications and an anthology. She cofounded and edited the journal Spectaculum, a magazine that was devoted to long poems, series, and projects best presented at length. A graduate of Reed College and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Hartigan has lived primarily on the West Coast and in Hawaii, and now works and lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and son.

"Endi Bogue Hartigan's poems are enveloping: one is immersed in experiences of ice drifts, orange peels, and the striving toward a clarity (Let us be clear, one poem reiterates) that crystallizes and then evaporates. Subjects and objects are beautifully combined and confused through repetitions both musical and mysterious; each separate thing helps to form the existence of another. A reader is drawn into a process of thinking—a kind of sifting and sorting—ambitious for the large world that is always beyond one's grasp. One Sun Storm is not a mere collection, but a total project in which each poem is part of the whole. The passing by of the pieces of this created world engenders gratitude and awe." — Martha Ronk, final judge and author of Vertigo, In a Landscape of Having to Repeat, and Why/Why Not

Poet B. T. Shaw
Tuesday, April 14th, SMU 238

Portland local B.T. Shaw has been a writer and editor for 20-plus years. Her first book, This Dirty Little Heart, won the 2007 Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry. Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in publications such as Field, Tin House, Orion, and Poetry Northwest, and she's participated in numerous readings, including the Seattle Poetry Festival. She edits the Poetry column for The Oregonian, where her book reviews also appear.
"These poems are works of immediately evident force. The telling in them is everything, and the voice that speaks them is new. Never regular, the language is itself part of the story. . . . These are poems born of what stays with us, from those raw things that are, quite simply, beyond memory."
—Alberto Ríos, author of The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body

Nonfiction Writer Debra Gwartney &
Fiction Writer Katherine Dunn
May, Date & Time TBD
Q & A following the readings

Debra Gwartney will be reading from her new book, "Live Through This." Gwartney is on the nonfiction writing faculty at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon, and is co-editor, with her husband Barry Lopez, of Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape, published in 2006 by Trinity University Press. Her short stories, personal narratives, essays, and articles have appeared in numerous journals, magazines, and newspapers. Debra is a former reporter for The Oregonian, was a nonfiction scholar at the Breadloaf Writers' Conference, and has received fellowships from Literary Arts, Hedgebrook Writer's Colony, the Wurlitzer Foundation, and the American Antiquarian Society.
Praise for Live Through This: "Gutsy, edgy, and revelatory, Gwartney's fast-paced tale of a family in pieces builds to a magnificent, hard-won communion. Her ability to follow the wildness in her own story uncovers truths about every parent, every child."—China Galland, author of Love Cemetery: Unburying the Secret History of Slaves and Longing for Darkness: Tara and the Black Madonna

Katherine Dunn is celebrating the 20th anniversary of her novel Geek Love, a finalist for the National Book Award in 1989. She also wrote the novels Attic (1970) and Truck (1971). She also wrote the text for Death Scenes: A Homicide Detective's Scrapbook (1995), a book of homicide photography; the humorous The Slice: Information with an Attitude (1989) (also published as Why Do Men Have Nipples? And Other Low-Life Answers to Real-Life Questions (1990), which contains her collected newspaper columns from Willamette Week. Dunn has written numerous articles for Playboy, Vogue, and the L.A. Times.
Praise for Geek Love: "Wonderfully descriptive. . . . Dunn [has a] tremendous imagination." —The New York Times Book Review
"Like most great novels, this one keeps the reader marveling at the daring of the author." –Philadelphia Inquirer
"Unrelentingly bizarre . . . perverse but riveting. . . . Will keep you turning the pages." –Chicago Tribune
All Events are Free and Open to the Public
Refreshments Provided


For more information about these events, please contact
psuglo@gmail.com or gradlit@pdx.edu