Writing & Reading at Centrum

Artistic Director Rebecca Brown P-I Writer-in-Residence

Rebecca Brown, Artistic Director for Literature at Centrum, is Writer-in-Residence at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer for the month of November. (You can read her contributions "A Ventriloquist" and "The Drunken Pilot" here.)

Brown is one of eleven Pacific Northwest writers--one for each month of the year--selected by the newspaper. The other featured writers are Tim Egan, David Guterson, Sherman Alexie, Charles R. Cross, Pete Dexter, Ivan Doig, Ellen Forney, Charles Johnson, Jonathan Raban, Tom Robbins, and Ann Rule.

Rebecca Brown not only has eleven books to her credit, she is well-known for her teaching, activism and outreach efforts in the Puget Sound literary community. Brown was the first writer in residence at Richard Hugo House and has taught there frequently ever since.

She is the co-founder of the Jack Straw Writers Program. Her best-known work is "The Gifts of the Body," a haunting novel about an AIDS caregiver that won the Lambda Literary Award. Her 1986 debut novel, "The Haunted House," recently has been reissued in a new paperback edition.

Brown often stretches literary boundaries, having collaborated with painter Nancy Kiefer on a book ("Woman in Ill-Fitting Wig"), as well as writing the libretto for a dance opera ("The Onion Twins") which premiered at Centrum in 2005. Her work often appears in anthologies and has been translated into Japanese, German, Danish, Italian and Norwegian.

News From Copper Canyon Press

Copper Canyon Press, the nation's largest independent publisher of poetry, was recently featured on the Lehrer NewsHour on Monday, October 22. To watch the video, follow this link.

In addition, poet W.S. Merwin's Present Company has just won the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress, which honors the best book of poems published over the past two years. Visit Copper Canyon Press at www.coppercanyonpress.org.

New Poetry

A Postcard from Eileen Myles:

"Whether you've been writing poems for a while, or are just dropping in from fiction or visual art, of just have an abiding love or disdain for poetry, I have a workshop for you.

I think about my favorite definition of "postmodernism" which is that all styles apply and the only real time is now. We'll look at different sorts of poetry throughout history--traditional, avant-garde, language, slam, personal, and revelatory--and see how, like moving through a thrift shop, we can pick up what we like and see what's ours. We'll also think about film as something that helps us to leap associatively on the page.

Anticipate in-class writing, walk-away assignments, and critique of one another, as well as the total exercise of much enthusiasm for reading, writing, and reinventing this compact and spiffy form."

The workshop takes place the weekend of February 21-24.

Pam Houston to Read at the Joseph F. Wheeler Theater

Pam Houston--former bartender, highway crew member, and river guide--will cap her Advanced Revision Workshop at Fort Worden with a public reading on Saturday, November 3, at  7:30 pm. Admission is free.

Houston gained international popularity in the early 1990s for short stories about women in relationships that are bad for them. Her stories have been translated into nine languages and been selected twice for the Best American Short Stories anthology, for the O. Henry Awards, and for the Best American Short Stories of the Century anthology. 

Houston is the author of two collections of linked stories, Cowboys Are My Weakness, which was the winner of the 1993 Western States Book Award, and Waltzing the Cat, which won the Willa Award for Contemporary Fiction. She edited a collection of fiction, nonfiction and poetry called Women on Hunting, and wrote the text for a book of photographs called Men Before Ten A.M. She also has a novel, Sighthound.

Currently the Director of Creative Writing at the University of California, Davis, Houston lives in Colorado at 9,000 feet above sea level, near the headwaters of the Rio Grande.

Chris Abani, Kim Addonizio, and Lesley Hazelton Slated for Centrum

We're thrilled to announce the first three faculty hirings for the 2008 Port Townsend Writers' Conference, taking place at Fort Worden State Park July 13 to July 20: poet and novelist Chris Abani, poet and novelist Kim Addonizio; and nonfiction writer Lesley Hazelton.

The prose of Chris Abani, who was once a political prisoner in Nigeria, includes the novels The Virgin of Flames, GraceLand, and Masters of the Board, as well as the novellas Becoming Abigail and Song For Night. His poetry collections include Hands Washing Water, Dog Woman, Daphne's Lot, and Kalakuta Republic. Abani teaches at the University of California, Riverside, and has won multiple awards for his work.

Kim Addonizio is the author of four books of poetry: The Philosopher's Club, Jimmy & Rita, Tell Me, and What Is This Thing Called Love, which was a finalist for the 2000 National Book Award. She also has a collection of stories, In the Box Called Pleasure. Her first novel, Little Beauties, was published in 2005. Her new novel, My Dreams Out in the Street, was released in July.

A former psychologist and political journalist with deep roots in both Judaism and Catholicism, Lesley Hazelton reported from Israel for Time magazine, specializing in religious and social and cultural issues. She has since written feature articles on Middle East politics for, among others, the New York Times, Esquire, Vanity Fair, The Nation, and Harper's. Her most recent book is Jezebel: the Untold Story of the Bible's Harlot Queen. Previous books include three volumes of Middle East reportage: Israeli Women, Where Mountains Roar, and Jerusalem, Jerusalem.

In advance of the Port Townsend Writers' Conference, the next Writers' events at Centrum will include the Advanced Revision Workshop with Pam Houston, November 1-4, 2007 and a weekend writers' workshop February 21-24, 2008.