PSW Reading Series Archives 2005-2006

Reading Series Archives 2005-2006

Monday, November 14, 2005
7 p.m. in the Northlight Gallery, Parks Building
Linda Bierds
is the author of seven volumes of poetry, most recently First Hand. Among her many awards are two NEA grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship. Her poems have appeared widely in the most prestigious national journals, including The Atlantic, Field, TriQuarterly, and The New Yorker. She is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Washington, and lives on Bainbridge Island.

Wednesday, January 25, 2006
2 p.m. in the Northlight Gallery, Parks Building
Margaret Riordan
is an EvCC college instructor, an herbalist, and a part-time poet. She has a doctorate from Syracuse University in feminist theory and the ethics of care. Her passions are herbalism as a way of life and finding ways to create social structures that are sustainable, caring and just. Inspired by the Irish bardic tradition of words as living entities, she writes to give voice to these concerns. She has a daughter in college, and lives in Edmonds with her white dog, her black cat, and a multitude of plant beings which dance on her porch.

Monday, February 27, 2006
7 p.m. in the Northlight Gallery, Parks Building
G.C. Waldrep
Waldrep's first book of poems, Goldbeater's Skin, won the 2003 Colorado Prize, judged by Donald Revell; his second full-length collection, Disclamor, will be released by BOA Editions in 2007. His work has received awards from the Academy of American Poets, the Poetry Society of America, among others. His poems have appeared in many journals, including Poetry, Ploughshares, and Kenyon Review. He has held residencies and fellowships at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. In 2005-06 he is serving as a visiting professor of history and poetry at Deep Springs College in California.

Monday, April 17, 2006
7 p.m. in the Northlight Gallery, Parks Building
Rebecca Hoogs & Sierra Nelson
Rebecca Hoogs
is the author of a chapbook, Grenade (2005) and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, AGNI, Crazyhorse, Zyzzyva, The Journal, Poetry Northwest, The Florida Review, and others. She is the recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire (2004) and Artist Trust (2005). She has taught English at the University of Washington, where she received her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Washington in 2000 and her M.A. in Literature in 2004. She lives in Seattle where she is the Director of Writers in the Schools (WITS), a program of Seattle Arts & Lectures.
Sierra Nelson earned her MFA in poetry from the University of Washington. She was a co-founder of and performer with the literary performance trio the Typing Explosion (1998-2004), and is currently collaborating as part of the Vis-a-Vis Society to create a Statistical Musical based on poetic-surveys. She has been a Writer-in-Residence through the Seattle Arts and Lectures Writers-in-the-Schools program, and has poems in publications including Swivel, Cranky, Louis Liard, and the Tate Museum Magazine.

Wednesday, May 10, 2006
7 p.m. in Parks Union MPR, Parks Building
Gala Final Event with Nancy Rawles
Nancy Rawles
is the author of three critically-acclaimed and award-winning novels - My Jim (Crown Publishing 2005); Crawfish Dreams (Doubleday, 2003), and; Love Like Gumbo (Fjord Press, 1997. All three novels address issues of sexuality, violence, and racial oppression in the lives of their female protagonists.
Love Like Gumbo won an American Book Award. Crawfish Dreams was selected for the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Program. My Jim tells the story of the wife and children of Mark Twain's famous slave character from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In her New York Times review, Helen Schulman called My Jim "as heart-wrenching a personal history as any recorded in American literature." My Jim was named one of the Best Books of 2005 by the Christian Science Monitor. In addition to novels, Nancy writes plays and teaches writing. She is also active in human rights work.