Written by Erin Leigh
Paul Harding and Nance Van Winckel are upcoming featured authors in the spring Visiting Writers Series. Their event will include a reading, Q&A and book signing at 7:00pm on April 14, 2016.*
All readings are free and open to the public.
About the Authors
Paul Harding is the author of two novels about multiple generations of a New England family: the Pulitzer Prize-winning Tinkers and Enon. A graduate of the University of Massachusetts, he was a drummer for the band Cold Water Flat before earning his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Harding has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship and was a fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Center in Provincetown. He now lives in Massachusetts with his wife and two sons.
Nance Van Winckel, originally from Roanoke, Virginia, has lived in Spokane, Washington since 1990. She graduated from Columbus High School in Wisconsin and from the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee. She received her M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Denver. Van Winckel has recently published her sixth book of poetry, Pacific Walkers, which was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award, and Ever Yrs, a novel told in the form of a scrapbook.
About the Books
Harding will be reading from his latest novel, Enon. The novel is narrated by Charlie Crosby
, the grandson and great-grandson of the two main characters from Harding’s Pulitzer Prize winning debut novel, Tinkers. The novel follows Charlie in the aftermath of the death of his 13 year old daughter. Named one of the best novels of the year, Enon has been called “Extraordinary . . . a darkly intoxicating read . . . [Harding’s] prose is steeped in a visionary, transcendentalist tradition that echoes Blake, Rilke, Emerson, and Thoreau” by The New Yorker.
Excerpt: https://www.bookbrowse.com/excerpts/index.cfm/book_number/2955/page_number/4/enon
Van Winckel will be reading from her most recent novel, Ever Yrs, which is told in scrapbook entries. The photographs are all captioned, some at great length, by the family matriarch, Grandy, to tell the story of a family filled with quirks, foibles and downright strangeness in the midst of the Y2K scare and a supposed virgin 
birth.
According to Diane Lefer, author of California Transit, “The soul of the West lives in Nance Van Winckel’s work, manifest in strange ways that never fail to haunt me.”
Excerpt: http://www.kenyonreview.org/kr-online-issue/2014-winter/selections/nance-van-winckel-342846/
*Venue to be determined
