Clark's Columbia Writers Series hosts two authors with powerful personal stories this quarter
Lydia Yuknavich and Debra Gwartney, inset, are both reading at Clark College as part of the Columbia Writers Series.
Clark College’s Columbia Writers Series will host two outstanding writers during winter quarter, both of whom are known for their beautifully written but brutal memoirs—one a recollection of an adolescence wracked with alienation and abuse, the other a wrenching account of a mother losing her own daughters to drugs and the streets.
Lidia Yuknavitch and Debra Gwartney will be reading from and discussing their work at two separate events in February. These events, which are free and open to the public, will be held on Clark’s main campus.
Read more about these two authors and their appearances at Clark:
Debra Gwartney
February 17, 12:30-1:30 p.m.
Penguin Union Building, Room 258C
Debra Gwartney is the author of Live Through This: A Mother’s Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love, a memoir published in 2009 and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. The book was also a finalist in 2009 for the National Books for a Better Life Award and the Oregon Book Award, and was shortlisted for the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award. Kirkus Reviews decribed it as “[a]n achingly beautiful chronicle of unfathomable sorrow, flickering hope and quiet redemption.”
Gwartney is also co-editor, along with her husband Barry Lopez, of Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape. She has published essays in many magazines, newspapers, and literary journals, including American Scholar, TriQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, Salon, Tampa Review, Kenyon Review, Crab Orchard Review, The New York Times (“Modern Love” column), and others.
Gwartney is a recipient of fellowships from The Writer’s Center, located in Bethesda, Maryland, the American Antiquarian Society, Portland’s Literary Arts, The Oregon Arts Commission, The Wurlitzer Foundation of Taos, New Mexico, and Hedgebrook Writers Colony. In 2000, she was a scholarship winner for the Breadloaf Writers Conference. She is currently a member of the nonfiction faculty for Pacific University’s MFA in Writing program.
Lidia Yuknavitch
February 23, 11:00 a.m. -12:00 p.m.
Penguin Union Building, Room 258A&B
Lidia Yuknavitch is the National Bestselling author of the novels The Small Backs of Children and Dora: A Headcase; the memoir The Chronology of Water; as well as three books of short fictions – Her Other Mouths, Liberty’s Excess, and Real to Reel; and a critical book on war and narrative, Allegories of Violence.
The Los Angeles Review of Books wrote of The Chronology of Water, “Yuknavitch’s fragmentary ‘anti-memoir’ relates a history filled in equal parts with violence and aesthetic discovery, sexual exploration and personal chaos. The Chronology of Water is striking for its emotional bareness, but also for its lapidary prose; each sentence is a beautiful gem, diamond-hard and precise.”
Yuknavitch’s writing has appeared in publications including Guernica Magazine, Ms., The Iowa Review, Zyzzyva, Another Chicago Magazine, The Sun, Exquisite Corpse, TANK, and in the anthologies Life As We Show It (City Lights), Wreckage of Reason (Spuytin Duyvil), Forms at War (FC2), Feminaissance (Les Figues Press), and Representing Bisexualities (SUNY), as well as online at The Rumpus.
She is the recipient of the Oregon Book Award – Reader’s Choice, a PNBA award, and was a finalist for the 2012 Pen Center creative nonfiction award. She writes, teaches and lives in Portland, Oregon.
