From the AU News Center
The Ashland University English Department has set its Spring 2019 Reading Series that will feature a fiction reading by Robert Olmstead on Feb. 21, a nonfiction reading by Elissa Washuta on Feb. 27 and a poetry reading by Mark Jarman and celebration of Ashland Poetry Press’s 50th Anniversary on April 8.
All readings are free and open to the public, and will be held in the Ronk Lecture Hall in the Dwight Schar College of Education. For more information, contact Lindsay Brandon-Smith at 419.289.5110 or lbrando2@ashland.edu.
Robert Olmstead will present the fiction reading at 3 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 21. He is an award-winning fiction writer and educator. His publications, Coal Black Horse, was the winner of the Heartland Prize for Fiction; The Coldest Night was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize; and Far Bright Star was the winner of the Western Writers of America Spur Award. Olmstead is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an NEA grant and is a professor at Ohio Wesleyan University.
Elissa Washuta will present her nonfiction reading at 4 p.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 27. Washuta is a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe and a nonfiction writer. She is the author of Starvation Mode and My Body Is a Book of Rules, named a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. With Theresa Warburton, she is co-editor of the anthology Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers. She has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Artist Trust, 4Culture, Potlatch Fund and Hugo House. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at Ohio State University.
Mark Jarman will present his poetry reading at 4 p.m. on Monday, April 8, and the event also will feature a celebration of Ashland Poetry Press’s 50th anniversary.
Jarman has published 10 collections of poems, a book-length poem, and two collections of essays on poetry, including The Heronry, Bone Fires: New and Selected Poems, Epistles and To the Green Man. Honors for his work include a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts grants, the Joseph Henry Jackson Award and the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets and The Nation magazine. He is a professor of English at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn.
