June 21, 2007
Well-known writers to speak as part of classes
Six well-known regional writers will speak at the UW this summer as the public part of two courses on the Pacific Northwest that will be taught jointly.
“A Sense of Where We Are” is a series of talks and readings associated with the English class Pacific Northwest Literature as well as the history class Writing the Region: A Documentary History of Pacific Northwest Identity. John Findlay, professor and chairman of the UW history department, and Dan Lamberton, director of the Humanities Division at Walla Walla College, will teach jointly but make different assignments.
Each of the six writers will meet with students registered in the class to discuss their work. Afterward, each will give a public lecture in the Henry Art Gallery auditorium
The speakers:
Heather McHugh: June 28, 2-3:30 p.m. McHugh has been Milliman Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the UW. Her most recent collection of poetry, Eyeshot (2003), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Debra Magpie Earling: July 11, 2-3:30 p.m. Earling is a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootena tribes. Her novel, Perma Red, won the American Book Award in 2003.
Kim Barnes: July 18, 2-3:30 p.m. Barnes grew up in the logging camps and small towns of northern Idaho. She’s written the novel Finding Caruso (2003) and two memoirs, In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in Unknown Country, winner of the PEN/Jerard Award and finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize; and Hungry for the World (2000). She is co-editor with Claire Davis of Kiss Tomorrow Hello: Notes from the Midlife Underground by Twenty-Five Women Over Forty (2006). Barnes teaches writing at the University of Idaho.
Robert Wrigley: July 24, 2-3:30 p.m. Raised in a family of Illinois coal miners, Wrigley now directs the M.F.A. program in Creative Writing at the University of Idaho. His latest poetry collections include Earthly Meditations: New and Selected Poems (2006); Lives of the Animals (2003); and Reign of Snakes (1999), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award.
Richard White: Aug. 2, 2-3:30 p.m. One of the most distinguished historians of the American West, White earned his graduate degrees and taught for nearly a decade at the UW before becoming the Margaret Byrne Professor of American History at Stanford University. His publications include Land Use, Environment, And Social Change (1980) and The Organic Machine (1995).
Marilynne Robinson Aug. 15, 7-8:30 p.m. Robinson received her doctorate from the UW in 1977. She is a professor at the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop. For her novel Gilead, she received the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Robinson’s first novel, Housekeeping (1980), won a PEN/Hemingway Award for best first novel. She has written two books of non-fiction: Mother Country (1989) and The Death of Adam (1998).
For more information, visit this Web site: http://depts.washington.edu/uwch/courses_undergraduate_northwest_summer07.htm.
To register for one of the courses, contact UW Summer Quarter at http://www.summer.washington.edu/summer/home.asp.
