School of Writing, Literature, and Film

The 2012-13 OSU Visiting Writers Series

All our events are free and open to the public and followed by a Q & A and book-signing. Please check the schedule frequently as changes in the time or venue may occur.

Gary Snyder
Friday, October 26, 7:30 p.m.
Whiteside Theater, downtown Corvallis
Co-sponsored by the Spring Creek Project for Nature, Ideas, and the Written Word

Gary Snyder's work has influenced many of the most dramatic literary and cultural movements of the past fifty years. A long-time Buddhist practitioner, avid outdoorsman, and environmental thinker, Snyder has worked to articulate the relationship of humans to the whole of nature.

Paisley Rekdal
Friday, February 15, 7:30 p.m.
Memorial Union Journey Room

Paisley Rekdal is the author of a book of essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee; the hybrid photo-text memoir Intimate; and for books of poetry, A Crash of Rhinos, Six Girls Without Pants, The Invention of the Kaleidoscope, and Animal Eye. Her work has received the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, a Village Voice Writers on the Verge Award, an NEA Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, the University of Georgia Press’ Contemporary Poetry Series Award, a Fulbright Fellowship, inclusion in the Best American Poetry series and various state arts council awards. Her poems and essays have appeared in or are forthcoming from The New York Times Magazine, American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, Virginia Quarterly Review, Tin House, and on National Public Radio among others.

Mike Rich
Thursday, April 4th, 7:30 p.m.
LaSells Stewart Center Construction & Engineering Hall

Mike Rich's screenwriting breakthrough came in 1998 when his script Finding Forrester was honored by the prestigious Nicholl Fellowship competition.  Within weeks it was picked up by Columbia Pictures and was a holiday season release in 2000, starring Sean Connery and directed by Gus Van Sant.  Mike's second screenplay The Rookie starred Dennis Quaid and Rachel Griffiths and was both a commercial and critical success for Disney in 2002.  The following year, Mike wrote the script for Radio, which starred Ed Harris, Cuba Gooding Jr. and Debra Winger.  

He has been a contributing writer on Miracle, Eight Below, and Invincible.  Mike's works also include The Nativity Story, a feature film on the Christmas story starring Keisha Castle Hughes and Oscar Isaac, and Secretariat, a Disney film which was released in the fall of 2010.  Mike and his wife Grace continue to make their home in the Portland area.

Dawn Raffel
Friday, April 19, 7:30 p.m.
The Valley Library Rotunda

Dawn Raffel's illustrated memoir, The Secret Life of Objects, was published in June by Jaded Ibis Press. The San Francisco Chronicle called it "lean, brilliant, playful." She is also the author of two story collections— Further Adventures in the Restless Universe and In the Year of Long Division—and a novel, Carrying the Body. Her stories have appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine, BOMB, Conjunctions, Black Book, Fence, Open City, The Mississippi Review Prize Anthology, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, Arts & Letters, The Quarterly, NOON, and numerous other periodicals and anthologies. She was a fiction editor for many years, followed by a seven-year stint as Executive Articles Editor at O, The Oprah Magazine and three years as Editor-at-Large at More magazine; she has also taught in the MFA program at Columbia University and at the Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia; Montreal; and Vilnius, Lithuania. She is now Editor at Large, Books at Readers Digest, and the editor of The Literarian, the magazine for the Center for Fiction in New York.

Antonya Nelson & Robert Boswell
Friday, May 10, 7:30 p.m.
The Valley Library Rotunda

Antonya Nelson is the author of four novels, including Bound (Bloomsbury, 2010) and six short story collections, including Nothing Right (Bloomsbury, 2009).  Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, Redbook and many other magazines, as well as in anthologies such as Prize Stories: the O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories. She is the recipient of a USA Artists Award in 2009, the 2003 Rea Award for Short Fiction, as well as NEA and Guggenheim Fellowships, and teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program, as well as in the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program.  She lives in Telluride, Colorado, Las Cruces, New Mexico, and Houston, Texas.

Robert Boswell’s collection of stories The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards was a finalist for the 2010 PEN USA Literary Award in fiction. He is the author of seven novels (including Century’s Son, Mystery Ride, and the forthcoming Tumbledown), three story collections, a play, a cyberpunk novel, and two books of nonfiction. He has received National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Iowa School of Letters Award for Fiction, the PEN West Award for Fiction, the John Gassner Prize for Playwriting, and the Evil Companions Award. His stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, Pushcart Prize Stories, Esquire, Colorado Review, and many other magazines. He is married to the writer, Antonya Nelson, and they have two children, Jade and Noah. Boswell teaches creative writing at the University of Houston, where he and his wife share the Cullen Endowed Chair in Creative Writing, and in the Warren Wilson MFA Program. He and his family live in Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado.