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.
2011-12 Schedule
View a list of former visiting writers.
Amina Gautier
Reading (Free and open to the public)
Thursday, Sept 29, 6:30 PM
Eliot Hall Chapel
Amina Gautier is the winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for her short story collection At-Risk (University of Georgia Press). Over sixty-five of Gautier's stories have been published, appearing in Best African American Fiction, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, North American Review, and Southern Review among other places. Her work has been honored with scholarships and fellowships from Breadloaf Writer’s Conference, Ucross Residency, and Sewanee Writer’s Conference and has been awarded the William Richey Prize, the Jack Dyer Award, the Schlafly Microfiction Award, the Danahy Fiction Prize, and a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Gautier teaches at DePaul University.
Madeline DeFrees
Reading (Free and open to the public)
Thursday, Oct 6, 6:30 PM
Eliot Hall Chapel
Madeline DeFrees has published two chapbooks and eight full-length poetry collections, including Spectral Waves (Copper Canyon, 2006) and Blue Dusk (Copper Canyon, 2001), which was awarded the 2002 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. DeFrees spent 38 years as a nun with the Catholic Congregation of Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary. She entered the community after high school and later requested release because, in her words, “religious life and poetry both demand an absolute commitment.” As Sister Mary Gilbert, Ms. DeFrees earned a BA in English from Marylhurst College (1948) and an MA in Journalism from the University of Oregon (1951). She studied poetry briefly with Karl Shapiro, Robert Fitzgerald, and John Berryman. She taught at Holy Names College, the University of Montana, and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Since she retired in 1985, she’s held residencies at Bucknell University, Eastern Washington University, and Wichita State University. Madeline DeFrees has received fellowships in poetry from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Skip Horack
Reading (Free and open to the public)
Thursday, Oct 13, 6:30 PM
Eliot Hall Chapel
Skip Horack is the author of the novel The Eden Hunter (Counterpoint 2010), a 2010 Book of the Year Award finalist, and the story collection The Southern Cross (Houghton Mifflin-Harcourt 2009), winner of the Bakeless Prize. His work has appeared in Oxford American, Epoch, the Southern Review, Narrative Magazine, and elsewhere. A native of Louisiana, Horack is currently a Jones Lecturer at Stanford, where he was also a Wallace Stegner Fellow.
Malena Mörling
Reading (Free and open to the public)
Thursday, Nov 10, 6:30 PM
Eliot Hall Chapel
Malena Mörling was born in Stockholm and grew up in southern Sweden. She is the author of two books of poetry, Ocean Avenue and Astoria. She has translated several Swedish poets and is editing the anthology, Swedish Writers on Writing. She is an Associate Professor at The University of North Carolina, Wilmington, Core Faculty in The Low-Residency MFA Program at New England College and a Research Associate at the School For Advanced Research in Santa Fe, NM. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007 and in 2010 she received a Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship.
Debra Gwartney
Reading (Free and open to the public)
Thursday, Feb 9, 6:30 PM
Eliot Hall Chapel
Debra Gwartney is the author of Live Through This, a memoir published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2009, and a finalist for the National Books Critics Award and the National Books for a Better Life Award. Her book was also short-listed for the Pacific Northwest Booksellers' Award and Oregon Book Award. Debra is the co-editor, with her husband Barry Lopez, of Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape. She is on the nonfiction faculty for the Pacific University low-residency MFA in writing and publishes in many journals and magazines. She is currently working on a book about growing up in the West, a chapter of which appeared in the summer 2011 issue of The American Scholar.
Nikky Finney
Reading (Free and open to the public)
Thursday, Mar 8, 6:30 PM
Eliot Hall Chapel
Nikky Finney was born by the sea in South Carolina. She is the author of four collections of poetry, On Wings Made of Gauze, Rice, recipient of a PEN America Open Book Award, and The World is Round, recipient of the 2004 Benjamin Franklin Award for Poetry, and her most recent work, Head Off & Split published by Northwestern University Press in 2011. In 1998 she authored a collection of short stories, Heartwood, written especially for literacy students. Finney has also written the script for the PBS documentary “For Posterity’s Sake: Lexington, Kentucky photographers Morgan and Marvin Smith,” the liner notes for folksinger Toshi Reagon’s compact disc “Kindness,” and the introduction to photographer Bill Gaskins’ collection, Good and Bad Hair. She has been awarded the Kentucky Foundation for Women “Artists Fellowship Award” and The Governor’s Award in the Arts.” She has taught at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, Berea College in Berea, Kentucky, and is a former faculty member at Cave Canem, a writing home for African-American poets. In 2006 she edited The Ringing Ear, an anthology of African American poets writing and reflecting on that historical American geography known as “the South.” She is presently professor of Creative Writing at the University of Kentucky.
Ander Monson
Reading (Free and open to the public)
Thursday, Mar 29, 6:30 PM
Eliot Hall Chapel
Ander Monson is the author of a host of paraphernalia including a decoder wheel, several chapbooks and limited edition letterpress collaborations, a website (http://otherelectricities.com), and five books, most recently The Available World (poetry, Sarabande, 2010) and Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir (nonfiction, Graywolf, 2010). He lives and teaches in Tucson, Arizona, where he edits the magazine DIAGRAM and the New Michigan Press.
Martha Collins
Reading (Free and open to the public)
Thursday, Apr 5, 6:30 PM
Eliot Hall Chapel
Martha Collins is the author, most recently, of White Papers (Pittsburgh, 2012), and of the book-length poem Blue Front (Graywolf, 2006), which won an Anisfield-Wolf Award and was chosen as one of “25 Books to Remember from 2006” by the New York Public Library. Collins has also published four earlier collections of poems, two collections of co-translated Vietnamese poetry, and two chapbooks. Her other awards include fellowships from the NEA, the Bunting Institute, the Witter Bynner Foundation, and the Ingram Merrill Foundation, as well as three Pushcart Prizes and a Lannan Foundation residency fellowship. Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College until 2007, Collins served as Distinguished Visiting Writer at Cornell University in 2010, and is currently editor-at-large for FIELD magazine and one of the editors of the Oberlin College Press. Another collection of her poems, Day Unto Day, is forthcoming from Milkweed in 2014.