Tuesday, October 11, 2011, 7:30 pm

Music Building Recital Hall

Harold Taw

Harold Taw's debut novel, Adventures of the Karaoke King (AmazonEncore 2011), is a karaoke grail quest about people who keep falling just short of their dreams. A participant in the 2009 Artist Trust EDGE Program for Writers and the 2011 Jack Straw Writers Program, Harold received an Artist Trust GAP award to research his second novel Saturday's Child, garnered accolades for his screenplay Dog Park, and had his work featured on NPR and in a New York Times bestselling anthology. Harold graduated from Yale Law School and as a Fulbright Scholar studied prostitution and the AIDS epidemic in rural Thailand.

A reviewer for The Star-Ledger newspaper in Newark, New Jersey praised Harold's novel as an "imaginative and engrossing tale," in which "the targets of his poison pen are consumerism, the tawdry accoutrements of tourist stops in the Southwest, corporate destruction of unique establishments in a quest to MacDonald's-ize commercial success, self-help gurus and the insanity of the justice system that demonizes immigrants."

An Amazon.com customer criticized Harold's novel as "[d]isturbing" and "the bleakest, grimmest book I've read in a very long time" because it left her "in the grip of an overwhelming sense that perhaps this is indeed all there is to life in America...."

Harold thinks both reviewers got it just about right. He is featured in a radio piece on karaoke produced for the NPR affiliate KPLU.

Lorraine Healy

November 8, 2011, 7:30 pm   
SURC Ballroom

Lorraine Healy, an award-winning Argentinean poet of Irish ancestry, was the first poet to receive a green card solely on the merits of her work. Her book of poems The Habit of Buenos Aires won the Patricia Bibby First Book Award and was published by Tebot Bach Press in 2010. She has won several other national awards including the Hackney Prize and has been published extensively both in the U.S. and her native Argentina. Healy graduated from the M.F.A in Poetry program at New England College, New Hampshire, as well as from the post-MFA Program at Antioch University Los Angeles. As a fine arts photographer, she has had several collective shows at the Bayview Front Room on Whidbey Island and participated in the Island Arts Council Open Studio Tour.

Phil Garrison

November 8, 2012, 7:30 pm

Cultural Museum, Dean Hall

Philip Garrison is the author of many books, including Augury and Waiting for the Earth to Turn Over(University of Utah Press), The Permit that Never Expires: Migrant Tales from the Ozark Hills and the Mexican Highlands (University of Arizona Press), and Because I Don't Have Wings: Stories of Mexican Immigrant Life(University of Arizona Press). He also founded APOYO, a volunteer group that offers advocacy, interpretation services, and a food and clothing bank that now serves some 400 people a month from Central Washington's Mexican communities. He is a recipient of the Associated Writing Programs Creative Nonfiction Award and a Governor's Writer's Award from Washington State. He is a professor emeritus at Central Washington University.

Lisa Norris

February 7, 2012
SURC Ballroom

Lisa Norris's story collection, Women Who Sleep With Animals (Stephen F. Austin State University Press 2010), won the Stephen F. Austin University Press Prize for fiction and was a finalist for the Spokane prize. Her first book, Toy Guns: Stories, won the Willa Cather Fiction Prize in 1999 and was published by Helicon Nine Press. Her stories, poems and creative nonfiction have been published in a number of literary journals-most recently Shenandoah, South Dakota Review, and Ascent--as well as an anthology called Kiss Tomorrow Hello (Doubleday 2006). She received her MFA in Creative Writing from American University, her MA from Idaho State University, and her BS in Fisheries & Wildlife from Virginia Tech. She is an associate professor at Central Washington University.

Brian Doyle

Monday, April 9, 2012, 7:30 pm  
SURC Theater

Brian Doyle is the author of Mink River (Oregon State University Press 2010). Some of his other works include The Grail: A Year Ambling and Shambling through an Oregon Vineyard in Pursuit of the Best Pinot Noir Wine in the Whole Wild World (Oregon State University Press), The Wet Engine (Paraclete Press) and five collections of essays. Doyle's work has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, American Scholar, Orion and in the Best American Essays anthologies of 1998, 1999, 2003 and 2005. He is editor of Portlandmagazine, the publication of the University of Portland, in Oregon.

Ted Kooser

Monday, April 16, 2012, 7:30 pm  
SURC Theater

Ted Kooser served as the U. S. Poet Laureate from 2004-2006, and his book Delights & Shadows won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for poetry Over a dozen volumes of his poetry were published between 1969 and 2007. Also an essayist, he is a Presidential Professor of English at The University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His writing is known for its clarity, precision and accessibility. He worked for many years in the life insurance business, retiring in 1999 as a vice president. He and his wife, Kathleen Rutledge, the retired editor of The Lincoln Journal Star, live on an acreage near the village of Garland, Nebraska. He has a son, Jeff, and a granddaughter, Margaret.

Daniel Orozco

Monday, May 14, 2012, 7:30 pm  
SURC Theater

Daniel Orozco, the author of Orientation: And Other Stories published in May, 2011 by Faber & Faber , also has published work in Best American Essays, Best American Short Stories, Best American Mystery Stories and Pushcart Prize anthologies, and in Harper's Magazine, Zoetrope, McSweeney's, Story Quarterly, and others. He was a Scowcroft and L'Heureux Fiction Fellow and a Jones Lecturer in Fiction in the Creative Writing Program at Stanford University. He has been awarded residencies from the MacDowell Colony and the Lannan Foundation, and is the recipient of writing fellowships from the Idaho Commission on the Arts, and from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is an assistant professor at the University of Idaho.