Colorado State Welcomes Nationally-Renowned Writers and Poets – and the Public – to Fall Reading Series

Colorado State University’s Creative Writing Program is hosting its annual Fall Reading Series 2004-2005 which runs September through December. In the spirit of continuing to develop and support vibrant arts in the Fort Collins community, the series will feature nationally-known writers and poets as well as Colorado State faculty and graduate students. All readings, free and open to the public, are followed by community receptions and book signings.

This year, fiction and nonfiction writer Chris Offutt; poets Donald Revell, Claudia Keelan and Jen Dick; and fiction writer Kent Haruf will be among several readers to share their work. Their readings promise to be a presentation of diverse and new approaches to fiction, poetry and nonfiction.

The Reading Series will kick off at 7:30 p.m. Sept. 16 in the Hatton Gallery, located in the Visual Arts Building on the Colorado State campus, with readings by fine arts’ graduate students Syl DeLeon, Rosa Salazar and Sara Cartmel.

The complete Reading Series schedule follows.

–     Thursday, Sept. 16: Sara Cartmel, Rosa Salazar and Syl DeLeon, 7:30 p.m., Hatton Gallery.

–     Thursday, Sept. 30: Fiction and nonfiction writer Chris Offutt, 7:30 p.m., Hatton Gallery.

–     Thursday, Oct. 28: Poets Donald Revell and Claudia Keelan, 7:30 p.m., Hatton Gallery

–     Friday, Nov. 5: Writer’s Harvest featuring Kent Haruf and members of the Colorado State faculty including John Calderazzo and Leslee Becker, 7:30 p.m., Location to be announced.

–     Thursday, Nov. 11: Colorado State alumnae Jen Dick, 7:30 p.m., Hatton Gallery.

–     Thursday, Dec. 2: Master’s degree candidates Matt Myers, Bonnie Emerick and Brice Particelli, 7:30 p.m., Natural Resources Building, Room 113.

Chris Offutt is the author of "The Good Brother," a novel, and two short story collections, "Kentucky Straight" and "Out of the Woods." His most recent publication is "No Heroes: A Memoir of Coming Home," published by Simon & Schuster in the Spring of 2003. Offutt’s work has appeared in several collections including such as Best American Short Stories 1994. He has been named Best Young American Writer by Granta and was recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship and the N.E.A. Fellowship. Offutt teaches at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.

Donald Revell is the author of four collections of poetry, "There are Three," "Beautiful Shirt," "Erasures" and "New Dark Ages." Revell has received numerous awards including the 1990 Ingram Merrill Foundation Fellow, 1992-1993 John Simmon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, 1995 Gertrude Stein Award in Innovative American Poetry and a 1995-1996 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow. Revell teaches American Literature and 20th Century Poetry at the University of Utah and is also the poetry editor for the Colorado Review.

Claudia Keelan is the author of five collections of poetry, including "Refinery," which won the Cleveland State University Poetry Prize, "The Secularist," winner in the 1997 Contemporary Poetry Series from the University of Georgia Press, and "Utopic," which won the 2000 Beatrice Hawley Award from Alice James Books. Keelan’s honors include a 1990 Jesse Stuart Award for excellence in teaching, a 1991 fellowship from the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, a 1992 grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and in 1997 "The Secularist" was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Her most recent collection, "The Devotion Field" was released this September by Alice James Books.

Jennifer Dick received her master of fine arts from Colorado State University. Her poetry has appeared in numerous magazines. Her book, "Fluorescence," is forthcoming from the University of Georgia Press.

Kent Haruf’s short fiction has appeared in Puerto Del Sol, Grand Street, Prairie Schooner and Gettysburg Review, and has been included in "Best American Short Stories" and "Where Past Meets Present: Modern Colorado Short Stories." Haruf’s awards include the American Library Association Distinguished Book List, the PEN-Hemingway Foundation Special Citation, a Whiting Foundation Writer’s Award and the Maria Thomas Award in Fiction. His most recent novels are "Eventide" and "Plainsong," winner of the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Award. His novel "The Tie That Binds" received a Whiting Foundation Award and a special citation from the PEN/Hemingway Foundation.

Leslee Becker, professor at Colorado State University, is a former James Michener Writing Fellow at Iowa and a Wallace Stegner Writing Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford. Becker teaches creative writing and literature and has published a story collection, "The Sincere Caf." Her stories have also appeared in The Atlantic, Ploughshares, Iowa Review, New Letters, Nimrod, The Gettysburg Review, New England Review and elsewhere. Becker has won several prizes and grants, including the Katherine Anne Porter Fiction Prize, the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society Prize, the Mid-List Press Award for Short Fiction, the Ludwig Vogelstein Award and the Pennock Distinguished Service Award.

A former full-time freelance writer of essays and magazine and newspaper articles, Colorado State University Professor John Calderazzo teaches fiction and nonfiction writing workshops. He is the author of two books, "101 Questions About Volcanoes" and "Writing From Scratch: Freelancing." Calderazzo writes about a wide variety of topics, including ecology, Asia, Buddhism and science. He writes a natural history column called "Science and the Shore" for Coastal Living Magazine and is finishing a new book, "Rising Fire: Volcanoes and Our Inner Lives."

For more importation about the Fall Reading Series, please contact Judea Franck at (970)-491-6839.

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