William Olsen Monday, September 17, 8:00p.m., The Little Theater

William Olsen is the author of four collections of poetry, The Hand of God and a Few Bright Flowers (Illinois, 1988), Vision of a Storm Cloud (Triquarterly, 1996), Trouble Lights (Triquarterly, 2002), and Avenue of Vanishing (Triquarterly, 2007). The Hand of God and a Few Bright Flowers, winner of the National Poetry Series, The Texas Poetry Award, and the Missouri Breakthrough Prize, was reissued as part of the Carnegie Mellon Classic Contemporary Series in 2003. He is the editor of New Issues Press. He is co-editor, with  Sharon Bryan, of Planet on the Table: Poets on the Reading Life (Sarabande), a book that has received critical acclaim for being the only anthology that brings together essays by nationally and internationally established poets on reading as a creative and critical activity. He is the recipient of a 2005 Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, A Nation/ Discovery Award, The Texas Institute of Arts Award, a Breadloaf Fellowship, and poetry awards from Poetry Northwest and Crazyhorse. He teaches creative writing and literature at Western Michigan University and at Vermont  College.

“[His] poems have a meditative breadth rare in much contemporary poetry. Olsen weaves heady contemplations of the nature of time and our human inabilities to grasp it, the redemption of memory and the relationship between the singular gaze and the collective 'other.” —Beckian Fritz Goldberg, author of The Book of Accident

Praise for Olsen’s Avenue of Vanishing

“Olsen’s work has a passionate thoughtfulness. He is an American poet of consciousness scrupulously interrogating himself and his generation while taking a hard look at our country. He is a conscientious maker who thinks under pressure, and his new book, his best yet—vehement, gritty, intellectual, and heartbreaking—strikes against our vanishing.”—Edward Hirsch

“A deep and humane intelligence talks to itself, and to us here: William Olsen grieves over a person, a nation, a world forsaking itself, forsaking God. And he gives us, too, voices of those who have not forsaken anyone.”—Jean Valentine

Praise for Olsen's Trouble Lights:

"Ravishingly visual and evocatively metaphysical, Olsen's poems illuminate unity in the universe, wildness in the heart." —Booklist

"The imagistic richness of Olsen's third collection stands in contrast to its themes: the transitory nature of existence, the circumscribed potential of human thought, and endeavor within a world eroded by inevitability ("this conquered/ vision we were given"). Olsen's poems are interrogative, probing concepts of past, present, and future with fusillades of self-perpetuating, sometimes self-negating, questions." —Library Journal

Rich Orloff Monday, October 1, 8:00 p.m., The Little Theater

Rich Orloff is the author of ten full-length plays and many one-acts. His plays have won the 1994 Playwrights First Award, 1995 Festival of Emerging American Theater, 1997 InterPlay International Play Festival, 1998 Tennessee Williams Playwriting Competition, 1999 Theater Conspiracy New Play Contest, 2000 Abeles Foundation Playwrights Award, 2002 Pickering Award for Playwriting Excellence, and 2004 New Voice Play Festival among others. His one-act comedies have been published in the annual Best American Short Plays anthology, The Art of the One-Act (New Issues, 2007), and Playscripts has published seven collections of his work.

Praise for Rich Orloff’s Couples:

“Both funny and poignant. Orloff moves the action in unexpected ways to create a real dramatic tension. There are wildly imaginative flights.”—New York Times

“[A]n exhilarating evening […] that fully demonstrates Orloff’s talents for writing with heart, hope, and humor.”—Gwen Orel, Backstage Review

“Each of these eight pieces has its own distinct voice and shows off Orloff’s great range as a writer. […] He manages to address some heavy issues that affect relationships [while] infusing each with a delicate balance of humor and gravity.”—Robin Reed, nytheater.com

Lia Purpura October 10, 8:00 p.m., The Little Theater

Lia Purpura was awarded a 2004 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Prose. Her collection of essays, Increase, won the Associated Writing Programs Award in Creative Nonfiction and was published by the University of Georgia Press in 2000. Her collection of poems, Stone Sky Lifting, won the Ohio State University Press/The Journal Award and was published in 2000 as well. Her manuscript, King Baby, recently won the 2007 Beatrice Hawley Award from Alice James Books. She is also the author of The Brighter the Veil (winner of the Towson University Prize in Literature), and Poems of Grzegorz Musial: Berliner Tagebuch and Taste of Ash, translated on a Fulbright year in Poland. Purpura is Writer-in-Residence at Loyola College in Baltimore, Maryland, and teaches at the Rainier Writing Workshop, a low-residency MFA Program in Tacoma, Washington. Her essay “Autopsy Report” was a “Notable Essay” in Best American Essays: 2004, and “Glaciology” was awarded a 2005 Pushcart Prize.

Reviews for On Looking: Essays:

From Booklist:

“Purpura, a poet and a poetic essayist whose work has garnered a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Fulbright, and a Pushcart Prize, puts readers into a state of aesthetic arrest as well as surprise, discomfort, and meditative pleasure via her pristine, radiant, and unflinching collagelike essays. Lest one think all is pretty and safe, she begins by witnessing autopsies and reporting on the unsettling beauty of what's hidden in life and exposed in death. Purpura also gazes intently, curiously, kindly, and sensuously at deformities, striving to be "like a child, neither moral nor immoral." She gazes at snow and thinks about glaciers, expresses the gratitude for simple things felt by those who have suffered pain and injury, and considers the resonance of a Faberge egg and a calf's jawbone. With grace, candor, and restraint, Purpura muses over what catches the eye and why, the sensation of being seen, the nature of invisibility, and the act of looking away. But most of all, she looks to connection and love.” –Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved.

"Purpura is the real deal, and so is every successive sentence in this collection. A cornucopiac vocabulary is married to a strict economy of expression; an offbeat curiosity is married to the courage of difficult witnessing. . . .”—Albert Goldbarth

"Purpura's prose is a system of delicate shocks-leaps and connections and syncopated revelations, all in the service of the spirit negotiating the truth of its experience." —Sven Birkerts

Robin Hemley October 29, 8:00 p.m., The Little Theater

Robin Hemley has published seven books of nonfiction and fiction. His latest, Invented Eden, The Elusive, Disputed History of the Tasaday (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003) was an American Library Association's Editor's Choice book for 2003. His other books include the memoir, Nola: A Memoir Of Faith, Art And Madness (Graywolf, 1998), which won an Independent Press Book Award for Nonfiction, the novel, The Last Studebaker (Graywolf), and the story collections, The Big Ear (Blair) and All You Can Eat (Atlantic Monthly Press). His awards for his fiction include, The Nelson Algren Award from the Chicago Tribune, The George Garrett Award for Fiction from Willow Springs, the Hugh J. Luke Award from Prairie Schooner, two Pushcart Prizes, and many others. He is director of the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa.

Reviews for Invented Eden:

From Booklist:
“News of the 1971 discovery of a band of peaceful "Stone Age" people living in the rain forests of the Philippines galvanized the media and captured the global imagination. The leaf-wearing, allegedly cave-dwelling Tasaday were championed by Manuel Elizalde, a wealthy, well-connected, and "megalomaniacal" Filipino of questionable character and motives who, whatever his failings, convinced the Marcos regime to set aside a large reserve to protect both the rain forest and its tribal people. Celebrities and the media had ready access to the cooperative Tasaday, and everyone exalted in this wondrous encounter, except for the anthropologists who were thwarted in their attempts to study these unique people and who eventually declared the entire Tasaday world nothing but a cruel and elaborate hoax. But was it? Hemley, a thoughtful novelist and memoirist, painstakingly unravels a dense snarl of romantic notions, political agendas, scientific rivalries, thorny personalities, and rampant misperceptions to disclose a far stranger tale. After enduring exhausting journeys, untrustworthy translations of suspect conversations, and confrontations with armed men and distressed women, and after discovering evidence of bribes, conspiracies, intimidation, betrayals, and "grotesque" ironies, Hemley wryly asserts, "We can be manipulated by our own expectations as much as by the machinations of others."—Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

"Terrific story... [and] savvy caution: In imagining where we came from, scientists have friends, enemies, agendas, careers, and ulterior motives." –Harper’s

"An account of a much-put-upon people . . . [and] a truly spectacular study of how understanding is forged."—Boston Globe

Marvin Bell November 7, 8:00 p.m., The Little Theater

Marvin Bell has been called "an insider who thinks like an outsider," and his writing has been called "ambitious without pretension." He was for many years the Flannery O'Connor Professor of Letters at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and served two terms as the state of Iowa's first Poet Laureate. He now teaches for the brief-residency MFA based in Oregon at Pacific University and splits the year between Iowa City, Iowa, and Port Townsend, Washington. He regularly performs with the bassist Glen Moore of the jazz group Oregon. He has collaborated with composers and dancers, as well as musicians, and is the creator of a form known as the "dead man poem,” for which he is both famous and infamous. The most recent of his nineteen collections of poetry and essays are Iris of Creation, The Book of the Dead Man, Ardor, Nightworks: Poems 1962-2000, Rampant, and his latest collection, Mars Being Red.

Bell is the recipient of awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Academy of American Poets, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Poetry Review and Poetry Magazine, and has held Senior Fulbright Appointments to Yugoslavia and Australia. He has visited numerous colleges as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and for five years led a summer program for teachers from the urban youth program, America Scores.

"Marvin Bell enlarges our understanding of what poetry can do.”—Georgia Review

"Marvin Bell has the largest heart since Walt Whitman."—Harvard Review

"Bell's poems, beyond their formal mastery, constitute an admirable project whose interrogations run deep." –Poetry

Victor LaValle Wednesday, November 14, 8:00 p.m. The Little Theater

Victor LaValle is author of Slapboxing with Jesus (Knopf, 1999), which won the PEN/Open Book Award, and The Ecstatic (Crown, 2002), which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Fiction Award. In 2004 he received a Whiting Writers’ Award. He has been a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and currently teaches creative writing at Columbia University .

“LaValle is a miracle. He's funny and tragic, he has an eye as sharp as a gem cutter's. He is the rarest of breeds, a natural artist.”—Michael Cunningham

“LaValle transforms streetsmart reality into an urban poetry of endurance. An energy and surprising humor informs LaValle's collection in which each beautifully observed, perfectly heard story builds toward a fierce affirmation still possible in art.”—Maureen Howard

Praise for Slapboxing with Jesus:

From Publishers Weekly:
“‘These days, the most revolutionary thing you can be is articulate,’ a teacher tells one of the characters in LaValle's debut collection, which—by that standard—is more than revolutionary: it's radiant. These 12 stories mostly concern boys—black, white, Latino, Asian—coming of age in Queens during the 1980s, and their strategies for surviving street life on the one hand and, just as harrowing, adolescence on the other. All bluster on the surface, LaValle's characters are disarmingly vulnerable underneath, and this book is as warm and funny as it is tough. The one thing these hard-shelled boys from the hood crave most is to be held tenderly. Unfortunately, they get in their own way more often than not. In ‘raw daddy,’ Sean spends his days dreaming of ways to save humanity, but can't resist cheating on his girlfriend. In ‘getting ugly,’ the ‘big eyes and funny skin’ narrator won't admit he's falling in love with beautiful Deidre; even as he watches a sentimental sunset with her, he insists he's just ‘out for ass.’ And in ‘class trip,’ 15-year-old Anthony makes arrangements with his friends to visit a crackhead prostitute behind his girlfriend's back. When they're not dreaming of love, LaValle's characters are dreaming of escape: Ahab joins the Marines, his best friend Horse moves to the suburbs and Anthony plots to get into trouble so he'll be sent to an aunt in Trinidad as punishment. The stories are stunningly crafted—especially the last seven, which all feature Anthony—and the writing is sharp and jazzy: parakeets are ‘not quite green... only half ripe’; goats have the faces of ‘Evil Professors’; and memories come ‘as easy as a cookie with your tea.’ If LaValle's characters make tragic, disastrous choices at times, they are nevertheless redeemed through the power of their narratives. ‘Minor Herodotus I will be, in remembering it all,’ LaValle writes; ‘our lives, to me, are important artifacts.’ This is an impressive, accomplished debut.”—Gloria Loomis
Copyright ©1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Praise for The Ecstatic:

“A compassionate mystery of madness . . . gritty and funny, both smart-alecky and dark.”
—Los Angeles Times

“[The] characters are as beautifully rendered as they are bizarrely believable. . . . LaValle . . . writes prose that hums in your ear and appeals to your intellect.” —The Washington Post Book World