2009-2010 Writer's Series

Essayist Richard Gilbert
Thursday, October 8 at 4 p.m. in Towers Hall 112

Richard Gilbert is a journalist and essayist, and the former marketing manager of Ohio University Press. He has taught at Ohio University, Indiana University and Ohio State, where he was a Kiplinger Fellow. Gilbert has operated a sheep farm for more than a decade in Athens, Ohio, and has written extensively about farming. He writes a blog, NARRATIVE, for writers, teachers, and students of narrative essays, literary journalism, creative nonfiction, and memoir.

Novelist Ann Pancake
Tuesday, October 27 at 3 p.m. in Cowan Hall

Ann Pancake is the author of this year’s Common Book, Strange As This Weather Has Been, about mountaintop removal mining in her home state of West Virginia. Her novel rings with the truth of documentary, as it is based on extensive interviews and conversations with people in the southern West Virginia and eastern Kentucky coalfields, but it is also a work of brave imagination—rich in characters and powerfully experimental in language.

Laotian American poet Bryan Thao Worra
Thursday, February 25 at 4 p.m. in Towers Hall 112

Bryan Thao Worra is the award-winning Laotian American author of several books of poetry including On the Other Side of the Eye, Winter Ink, My Dinner With Cluster Bombs and Touching Detonations. His work is taught internationally in colleges and high schools and has appeared in over 100 newspapers, magazines and anthologies around the world.

Poet Mark Doty
Tuesday, April 20 at 4 p.m., location TBA

Mark Doty is a National Book Award winning American poet and memoirist. In 1989, his partner Wally Roberts tested positive for HIV, which drastically changed Doty's writing. Roberts's death in 1994 inspired Doty to write Atlantis, and Heaven's Coast: A Memoir also deals with this subject. In 1995, he won the ₤10,000 T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, the first American poet to have done so. He has published twelve books of poems, including Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems won the 2008 National Book Award.

About the Writer's Series

The Otterbein Writers' Series brings poets and writers to campus for readings and workshops. Its purpose is to provide students and faculty, and also area residents, with chances to meet contemporary writers and to hear literary works performed.

Otterbein is a member of the Ohio Poetry Circuit, a consortium of nine Ohio colleges that cooperate to bring nationally known poets to Ohio. Recent circuit poets have included the current and previous U.S. poet laureates, Billy Collins and Robert Pinsky, as well as many renowned poets such as William Stafford, Mary Oliver, Stephen Dunn and Yosef Komunyakaa.

In recent years, the Writers' Series has been assisted by grants from the Perceval Fund of the Columbus Foundation and the Ohio Arts Council in expanding events to include a week-long festival of readings and workshops about writing and the teaching of writing. Past festivals have explored themes such as Writing and Social Change and Writers and Community.

The Writers' Series has also initiated participation by graduates of the Otterbein English program. These writers have included fiction writer Michael Olin-Hitt (class of 1986) and John Deever (class of 1990), author of Singing on the Heavy Side of the World: A Peace Corps Ukraine Story.

Below is a partial list of participants in the Otterbein Writers' Series since its inception in 1980:

Nick Carbo, Paul Zimmer, Collette Inez, Mary Oliver, Michael Ryan, William Stafford, Alberta Turner, Betty Adcock, Dick Allen, Stephen Dunn, Arthur Smith, Rodney Jones, Mary Swander, Eamon Grennan, Elizabeth Spires, Annabel Thomas, Larry Levis, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Yusef Komunyakaa, Linda Bierds, Scott Sanders, Gerald Stern, David St. John, Doug Swift, Carolyn See, Patti Ann Rogers, Steve Orlen, Susan Mitchell, Diane Kendig, Michael Martone, Amy Clampitt, Jim Wayne Miller, James Perkins, Albert Goldbarth, Brenda Hillman, Jim Barnes, William Alexander, Helen Frost, Candyce Barnes, Terry Hermsen, Carol Muske, Charles Frederick, Ellen Bryant Voight, Jeff Gundy, John McCluskey, P.J. Corso, Susan Orlean, Lynne McMahon, Lynna Williams, Hillary Masters, Billy Collins, David Wagoner, Molly Bendall, Robert Demott, Jerry Roscoe, Judith Hall, Angie Estes, Denise Duhamel, Herbert Martin, Peter Cooley, David Baker, David Lazar, and John Koethe.

The director of the Otterbein Writers' Series is Dr. Jim Gorman, professor of English (JGorman@otterbein.edu or 614-823-1133).