Mary Szybist and Michele Glazer are the next featured authors in this year’s Visiting Writers Series. This event will include a reading, Q&A and book signing at Aunties Bookstore in downtown Spokane at 7:30 p.m.
All readings are free and open to the public.
Mary Szybist is most recently the author of Incarnadine, winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Poetry. Her work has appeared in several publications as Best American Poetry, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, and two Pushcart Prize anthologies. Finding success in writing came early for Szybist as her first book Granted won the 2004 GLCA New Writers Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Szybist earned degrees from the University of Virginia and the Iowa Writers workshop, where she was a Teaching-Writing Fellow. Today, she resides in Portland, Oregon where she teaches at Lewis & Clark College.
“Szybist persistently tightens the association between revelation and destruction, presenting the other side of an unspoken loss that seems to lurk in the decade Incarnadine emerges from: a loss of faith, urgency, purpose, love, inspiration. . . . The book’s original, rich immediacy stays present, much as an array of mockable visions stays present for Szybist’s speaker—stifling and seducing.”—Slate
Michelle Glazer’s most recent book is On Tact, & the Made Up World (Iowa 2010). Her other work include It Is Hard to Look at What We Came to Think We’d Come to See, which received the 1996 AWP Award in poetry and was published in 1997 by the University of Pittsburg Press. She has published widely in periodicals including Volt, Harvard Review, Field, Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, Colorado Review and College English. She earned her MFA from the University of Iowa Writers Workshop and has taught at Portland State University and the Mountain Writers Center. In 2001, Glazer received the Regional Arts and Culture Council’s (RACC) first Individual Artist Fellowship in Literature.
“These poems seem balanced on the edge of an enormity, desperate to be changed or ‘stained’ by what’s unseen. Continually changing scale, stuttering and beginning again at the border where perspective suddenly turns ‘abstract,’ Michele Glazer’s poems remind me of Elizabeth Bishop’s in their dramatization of the human cost of our need to map and know and understand.”—Thomas Gardner, author, A Door Ajar: Contemporary Writers and Emily Dickinson
About the Books
Mary Szybist will be reading out of her novel “Incarnadine” According to National Book Awards Judges, “Szybist blends traditional and experimental aesthetics to recast the myth of the Biblical Mary for this era. In these poems, you can expect Szybist to examine the refinement of love, loss, and the struggle for religious faith in a world that seems to argue against it.” Michelle Glazer will be examining her latest novel, On Tact, & the Made Up World. According to the University of Iowa Press, her poems take on the powers and anxieties of transformation, and on questions of being and value, “exploring not just what is, but how is.”
The Specifics
May 15th at 7:30pm
EWU Visiting Writers Series: Mary Szybist and Michele Glazer
Aunties Bookstore
402 W. Main
Spokane, WA 99201
(509) 838-0206
