Oregon Book Award Author Visits Hood River

The Oregon Book Awards Author Tour brings Alexis Smith to Hood River on Sunday, May 19.

Oregon Book Awards finalist Alexis Smith will appear at the Hood River library (502 State Street)  for an author talk on Sunday, May 19 at 2:00 p.m.

Alexis M. Smith grew up in Soldotna, Alaska, and Seattle, Washington.  She holds degrees from Portland State University and Goddard College. She was selected as a finalist in fiction for her debut novel Glaciers, published by Tin House Books.

Alexis Smith spent her early years in Alaska. When she was in sixth grade, her family moved to Seattle. She’s spent the last twelve years in Portland. But images from her Alaskan childhood still fill her stories and dreams.

Glaciers follows Isabel through a day in her life in which work with damaged books in the basement of a library, unrequited love for the former soldier who fixes her computer, and dreams of the perfect vintage dress move over a backdrop of deteriorating urban architecture and the imminent loss of the glaciers she knew as a young girl in Alaska.

Emilee Booher wrote in Willamette Week that Glaciers is “…like a book of poetry, leaving an unstated longing for permanence in an ephemeral world.” Publisher’s Weekly described it as “lyrical and luminous”.

More reviews of Glaciers:
“An Alaska childhood and dreams of faraway cities such as Amsterdam inform Alexis M. Smith’s Glaciers, a delicate debut novel set in Portland, Oregon-”a slick fog of a city…drenched in itself”-that reveals in short, memory-soaked postcards of prose a day in the life of twentysomething library worker Isabel.”
-Lisa Shea, ELLE

“Glaciers, Alexis Smith’s brilliant debut novel, is filled with kaleidoscopic pleasures. Using prose as clear as pure, cold air, Smith moves the narrative vertically as well as horizontally, each ticking minute yielding more insights into a young woman’s life revealed over one single day. The past, present, and imaginary future stream into beautifully unstable geometries: Isabel’s childhood snows from her youth in Alaska are juxtaposed against her adult trip to a vintage thrift store; her hopes for an evening party push against the echoes of war that haunt a young soldier whom she loves. Line by line, in and out of time, this is a haunted, joyful, beautiful book–a true gift.”
-Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia!

Local support for this tour comes from the Hood River Library.

Oregonians are passionate about books. And ideas, and great writing. Literary Arts shares this passion. Our mission is to engage readers, support writers and inspire the next generation with great literature. The programs of Literary Arts include: Writers in the Schools, Oregon Book Awards & Fellowships, Portland Arts & Lectures and Delve: Readers’ Seminars.

For more information about the programs of Literary Arts please contact us at 503.227.2583 or visit
www.literary-arts.org

More information forthcoming.

Join Franklin High School students as they read their work at BiPartisan Cafe. This is a Writers in the Schools end-of-residency reading open to the public.

Franklin HS
Tuesday, May 21, 7pm
BiPartisan Cafe
7901 SE Stark

Celan Salon at Literary Arts

Joanna Klink, Katja Garloff, Lisa Steinman, John Beer

Joanna Klink, Tin House Writer-in-Residence at PSU, will lead the salon with a talk about hermeticism in the poems of Paul Celan. Klink’s book project, Strangeness, is a lyric meditation on Celan’s poetry — poetry that his critics called “obscure” — and an exploration of the strangeness of poetry in general. She will be joined on the panel by Lisa Steinman and Katja Garloff from Reed College, and John Beer from PSU.

The discussion will focus on three poems, which you can download here. Audience participation is encouraged.

Tune in to Oregon Public Broadcasting as they provide an encore broadcast of Nikky Finney’s April 23, 2013 Portland Arts & Lectures presentation.

For more information, click here.

Oregon Book Club Conversation Series

Poet Mary Szybist, author of Oregon Book Club’s latest selection Incarnadine, will appear at Literary Arts to speak with fellow poet Elyse Fenton about her work, the state of Oregon poetry, and her teaching at Lewis & Clark.

The Oregon Book Club is a program of Oregon Writers Colony.