Colorado State University Celebrates Writers Harvest, Collects Donations for Community Programs
Colorado State University’s Reading Series celebrates Writers Harvest with readings at 7:30 p.m. on Nov. 5 in the Lory Student Center West Ballroom on the main campus. National Book Award winner Kent Haruf and Colorado State creative writing faculty members Leslee Becker, John Calderazzo and Matthew Cooperman will give readings of their work followed by a reception and book signings.
The Writers Harvest reading is open to the public and admission is by cash donations or canned food items. The cash and food will be donated to the Food Bank of Larimer County, Turning Point Center for Youth and Family Development and Crossroads Safe House.
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." His 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 and a finalist for the National Book Award in 1999, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and The New Yorker Book Award. His novel, "The Tie That Binds" (Vintage, 2000), received a Whiting Foundation Award and a special citation from the PEN/Hemingway Foundation. He is also the author of "Where You Once Belonged."
Becker, a former James Michener Writing Fellow at Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a Wallace Stegner Writing Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford, teaches creative writing and literature and has published a story collection, "The Sincere Caf." Her stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Ploughshares, Iowa Review, New Letters, Nimrod, The Gettysburg Review, New England Review and elsewhere. She 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.
Calderazzo, a former full-time freelance writer of essays and magazine and newspaper articles, teaches fiction and nonfiction writing workshops. His most recent book, "Rising Fire: Volcanoes and Our Inner Lives," recently was released by The Lyons Press. He also is author of "101 Questions About Volcanoes" and "Writing From Scratch: Freelancing." He has written a natural history column called "Science and the Shore" for Coastal Living magazine. Calderazzo writes about a wide variety of topics, including ecology, Asia, Buddhism and science.
Cooperman teaches poetry writing workshops, ecopoetics and literature courses. He is the author of "A Sacrificial Zinc," which won the Lena Miles Wever Todd Prize from Pleiades Press, and "Surge," winner of the Wick Chapbook Prize from Kent State University. His poems have appeared in journals such as LIT, Verse, Denver Quarterly, EPR, ecopoetics, Colorado Review, Chicago Review, ACM, Many Mountains Moving and Quarterly West. His essays, interviews and provocations have appeared in Iowa Review, Rolling Stock, Weber Studies, The Writer’s Chronicle and Field, among others. A founding editor of the exploratory prose journal Quarter After Eight, Cooperman was a Fine Arts Work Center Fellow at Provincetown. He is currently at work on a critical study in ecopoetics, a new book of poems and a book of interviews in contemporary American poetry and poetics, "Questioning Witness."
The Reading Series is sponsored by the Colorado State English Department, the Organization of Graduate Student Writers, Arts Alive, and University Park Holiday Inn and KRFC Homegrown Radio 88.9 FM.
For more importation about the Writers Harvest, contact Judea Franck at (970) 491-6839.
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