Scheduled GLO readings:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Tuesday, April 14th, B. T. Shaw & Erin Ergenbright

Smith Student Union 238, 7 - 9 PM

Free and open to the public


Poet B. T. Shaw


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 forPoetry. 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.

Praise for This Dirty Little Heart

"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


Fiction & Non-Fiction Writer Erin Ergenbright

Erin Ergenbright is the co-author of The Ex-Boyfriend Cookbook (with Thisbe Nissen), and a founder of the Loggernaut Reading Series. She earned her MFA at the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop, where she was a James Michener-Paul Engle fellow, and her writing has appeared in The Believer Magazine, Tin House, Portland Monthly, The Oregonian, The May Queen: Women on Life, Love, Work and Pulling It All Together in Your Thirties (J.P. Tarcher), Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant: On Cooking for One and Dining Alone (Riverhead Books), Colorado Review, Indiana Review, Paste Magazine, Oklahoma Review, Dislocate and elsewhere.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Reading with Miriam Gershow

Thursday, April 16th, 7 - 9 pm

Smith Student Union, room 236

Free and open to the public


Miriam Gershow is a novelist, short story writer and teacher. Her debut novel, The Local News, was published in February 2009. It has been called “deftly heartbreaking” with “urgency and heft” by The New York Times, as well as “an accomplished debut” (Publisher’s Weekly) with a “disarmingly unsentimental narrative voice,” (Kirkus Reviews).

Miriam is the recipient of a Fiction Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, as well as an Oregon Literary Fellowship. Her storiesappear in The Georgia Review, Quarterly West, Black Warrior Review, Nimrod International Journal, The Journal, and Gulf Coast, among other journals. Miriam’s stories have been listed in the 100 Distinguished Stories of The Best American Short Stories 2007 and appeared in the 2008 Robert Olen Butler Prize Stories. She is also a past winner of the AWP Intro Journals award and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

She received her MFA from the University of Oregon. She taught fiction writing at the University of Wisconsin as well as descriptive writing to gifted high school students through Johns Hopkins University. She currently lives in Eugene with her husband, where she writes and teaches writing at the University of Oregon and Portland State University.



Praise for The Local News:

Beneath this darkly humorous tale of loss is a keen look at the painfully stratified world of high school, and a reminder that just because we're supposed to feel sad doesn't mean we always do.

-Marie Claire

In her first novel, writer Miriam Gershow powerfully explores themes of love, longing, family, friendship and loss... Lydia reflects on the days surrounding her brother's disappearance with a mix of blunt honesty and dry humor. As a writer, Gershow succeeds in creating a likeable character struggling with big-time family issues.

-BUST

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Debra Gwartney & Katherine Dunn

Thursday, May 21st, 7 - 9 PM

Smith Student Union, room 236

Free and open to the public

Nonfiction Writer Debra Gwartney

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

Fiction Writer Katherine Dunn
Dunn's 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