The Deschutes Public Library and Second Sunday announce a joint reading by Robert McDowell and Ellen Waterston on Sunday, June 10 at 2pm. An open mic will follow the reading. This event is free and open to the public.
McDowell, the new executive director of The Nature of Words, has five books of poetry and is the author of The More We Get Together: The Sexual and Spiritual Language of Love (Poiesis Press) and the Amazon.com bestselling Poetry as Spiritual Practice: Reading, Writing and Using Poetry in Your Daily Rituals, Aspirations, and Intentions (Free Press/Simon & Schuster). He is also the co-author of two volumes of literary theory, co-translator of a collection of stories by Ota Pavel that has just been reprinted in the eastern European Penguin Classics Series, and the editor of three anthologies.
His new book of poetry, The World Next to This One, will be published in Ireland in 2013 by The Salmon Publishing Co. For twenty-two years, he served as a founder and executive director/publisher of Story Line Press, a non-profit publisher of serious literature. While there, he selected and guided into print 250 books, including volumes by five US Poet Laureates, six Pulitzer Prize winners, and a Nobel Laureate. At Story Line, he doubled as development director.
Waterston is the award-winning author of a memoir, a collection of essays, two of poetry and one of assorted writings. She was the winner of the 2008 NW Perspectives Essay Contest and is a frequent contributor to Oregon Quarterly. She is on the faculty of Fishtrap’s 2012 Gathering as the resident author/instructor at Outpost, a nature writing workshop conducted on the Zumwalt Prairie in July. In 2013 she will judge the 2013 Northwest Perspectives Essay Contest and be the keynote speaker at the NW Poets Concord.
After ten years at the helm of The Nature of Words, a Bend-based literary arts organization, she ended her tenure as founder/director in 2012 to help nurture OSU-Cascades’ low-residency MFA in Creative Writing. She is the president of the Writing Ranch, founded in 2000, which offers creative writing workshops and retreats for emerging writers in the United States and Mexico.
