Visiting Writers
The Visiting Writer Series at Reed College is sponsored by the Department of English. The intent is to bring interesting and diverse writers of prose and poetry to Reed to enhance our courses with readings and discussions.
The Department maintains a mailing list to which interested people can subscribe, to receive details of the upcoming Readings. The mailings are either electronic or paper. You can subscribe by emailing the Department office at vswr@reed.edu or calling the Department at 503-777-7753.
2010-11 Schedule
View a list of former visiting writers.
Angie Chau
Reading (Free and open to the public)
Thursday, Oct 7, 6:30 PM
Psychology Building Auditorium 105
Angie Chau is the author of Quiet As They Come, a short story collection, and winner of the 2009 Maurice Prize in fiction. Born in Vietnam, she has lived on three continents and two islands. Her work has appeared in the Indiana Review, Night Train, Santa Clara Review, Slant, and the anthology, Cheers To Muses. She has a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis where she also taught undergraduate fiction and was the fiction editor for The Green Belt Review. Angie lives in Northern California.
Carol Moldaw
Reading (Free and open to the public)
Thursday, Oct 28, 6:30 PM
Psychology Building Auditorium 105
Carol Moldaw's most recent book is So Late, So Soon: New and Selected (Etruscan Press, 2010). She is the author of four other books of poetry, The Lightning Field, which won the 2002 FIELD Poetry Prize, Through The Window, Chalk Marks on Stone, and Taken From The River, as well as a novel, The Widening. Moldaw is the recipient of a Lannan Foundation Marfa Writer's Residency, an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, and a Pushcart Prize, and her work is published widely in journals, including AGNI, Antioch Review, Boston Review, FIELD, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Threepenny Review, and Triquarterly. It has also been anthologized widely. Moldaw lives outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico with her husband and daughter. In the spring of 2011 she will be the Louis D. Rubin, Jr., Writer-in-Residence at Hollins University.
David Bezmozgis
Reading (Free and open to the public)
Thursday, Nov 11, 6:30 PM
Psychology Building Auditorium 105
David Bezmozgis is the author of Natasha and Other Stories, which was named a New York Times Notable Book, one of the New York Public Library's 25 Books to Remember for 2004, and an Amazon.com Top 10 Book for 2004. It won the Toronto Book Award and the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for First Book. David’s stories have appeared in numerous publications including The New Yorker, Harpers, Zoetrope All-Story, and The Walrus. In 2009, his feature film, Victoria Day, received a Genie Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay. A Guggenheim Fellow and a MacDowell Fellow, in 2010, Bezmozgis was included in The New Yorker's 20 Under 40 issue, celebrating the twenty most promising fiction writers under the age of forty.
John Murillo
Reading (Free and open to the public)
Thursday, Nov 18, 6:30 PM
Psychology Building Auditorium 105
John Murillo is the author of the poetry collection, Up Jump the Boogie. A graduate of New York University's MFA program in creative writing, he has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the New York Times, the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. His work has appeared in such publications as Callaloo, Court Green, Ninth Letter, and Ploughshares, and is forthcoming in Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of African-American Poetry.
Eugene Gloria
Reading (Free and open to the public)
Thursday, Mar 10, 6:30 PM
Psychology Building Auditorium 105
Eugene Gloria is the author of two books of poems, Hoodlum Birds and Drivers at the Short-Time Motel, which was selected for the 1999 National Poetry Series and the 2001 Asian American Literary Award. He has also received a Fulbright Research Grant, a grant from the San Francisco Art Commission, a Poetry Society of America Award, a Pushcart Prize. Gloria holds degrees from San Francisco State University, Miami University and the University of Oregon. He teaches creative writing and English literature at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana.
Elyse Fenton
Reading (Free and open to the public)
Thursday, Mar 31, 6:30 PM
Psychology Building Auditorium 105
Elyse Fenton’s first book, Clamor, recently won Cleveland State University Press's First Book award, and was released in 2010. A Reed graduate, she received her MFA from the University of Oregon and has published poetry and nonfiction in The New York Times, Best New Poets, and The Massachusetts Review, among other places. In the past few years, she's lived somewhat itinerantly in Austin, Philadelphia and Portland.
Ron Currie, Jr.
Reading (Free and open to the public)
Thursday, Apr 7, 6:30 PM
Psychology Building Auditorium 105
Ron Currie, Jr. is the author of God is Dead and Everything Matters! His work has been translated into more than a dozen languages, and received the New York Public Library Young Lions Award, the Addison M. Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Alex Award from the American Library Association. A new novel will be published in 2011.
Joe Wenderoth
Reading (Free and open to the public)
Thursday, Apr 14, 6:30 PM
Psychology Building Auditorium 105
Joe Wenderoth is the author of three books of poems, a novel and a collection of essays, the most recent of which are No Real Light, Letters to Wendy’s and The Holy Spirit of Life: Essays Written From John Ascroft’s Secret Self, respectively. His first two books of poetry, Disfortune and It Is If I Speak, are both published by Wesleyan University Press. His films can be seen on YouTube. Wenderoth is Professor of English at the University of California, Davis.