Fall 2008

Elissa Schappell

Thursday, October 2, 6:30 p.m.
Psychology 105

Elissa Schappell is the author of Use Me, a collection of ten related stories that explore the relationships between friends and family, betrayal and loyalty. A contributing editor to Vanity Fair, Schappell is a co-founder of the literary magazine Tin House. She is a coeditor of the anthology The Friend Who Got Away. She received her MFA from the Creative Writing Program at New York University, has been a senior editor at The Paris Review and has contributed to numerous magazines including GQ, Vogue, Bomb, Bookforum, and Spin.

Pauls Toutonghi

Thursday, October 2, 6:30 p.m.
Psychology 105

Pauls Toutonghi was born in 1976 in Seattle, Washington. His fiction has appeared in Zoetrope: All-Story, One Story Magazine, The Boston Review, Glimmer Train, Book Magazine, Terminus, and other small periodicals. He received a Pushcart Prize for his short story, “Regeneration,” which appeared in The Boston Review in 2000. His first novel, Red Weather, was published by Random House in 2006. It has been translated into Latvian and German. His other writings have appeared in Sports Illustrated, The Crab Creek Review, and The Yemen Observer. He is a mongrel—half-Latvian and half-Egyptian. His earliest memories are steeped in linguistic confusion. He received his MFA in poetry and his PhD in English literature from Cornell University. He now teaches at Lewis & Clark College.

Marie Howe

Thursday, October 30, 6:30 p.m.
Psychology 105

Marie Howe is the author of three volumes of poetry, The Good Thief, What the Living Do, The Kingdom of Ordinary Time, and is the coeditor of a book of essays, In The Company Of My Solitude: American Writing From The Aids Pandemic. She is the recipient of a Lavan Younger Poets Prize from the American Academy of Poets, an NEA, a Guggenheim, and has been a fellow at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, Agni, Ploughsahres, Harvard Review, and The Partisan Review, among others. Currently, Howe teaches creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia, and New York University.

Stephen Elliott

Thursday, November 6, 6:30 p.m.
Psychology 105

Stephen Elliott is the author of six books including the story collection My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up and the novel Happy Baby, which was a finalist for the New York Public Library's Young Lion Award, as well as a Best Book of 2004 in Salon.com, Newsday, Chicago New City, the Journal News, and the Village Voice. In addition to writing fiction he frequently writes on politics. In 2004 he wrote a book about the quest for the Democratic presidential nomination titled Looking Forward To It. Elliott's writing has been featured in Esquire, the New York Times, GQ, the Best American Nonrequired Reading 2005 & 2007, the Best American Erotica, and Best Sex Writing 2006. He is also the editor of three collections of politically inspired fiction and the founder of the Progressive Reading Series, which helps authors raise money for and participate on behalf of progressive candidates and causes.

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C. S. Giscombe

Thursday, November 20, 6:30 p.m.
Psychology 105

C. S. Giscombe was born in Dayton, Ohio. His poetry books are Postcards, Here, and Giscombe Road. His book of linked essays is Into and Out of Dislocation. Reed students have written senior theses on his books Here and Giscombe Road. His most recent book of poems, Prairie Style, was just released. He is working on a book about trains and train metaphors, Railroad Sense. His work appears in the anthologies Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry, Lyric Postmodernisms, and American Hybrid, among others. Giscombe has won a Carl Sandburg Award, and has received grants from the NEA, the Illinois Arts Council, the Fund for Poetry, and the Council for the International Exchange for Scholars. Giscombe currently teaches at Berkeley and is a long distance cyclist.

Susan Straight

Thursday, March 12, 6:30 p.m.
Psychology 105

Susan Straight's novels include I Been in Sorrow’s Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots, Blacker than a Thousand Midnights, The Gettin Place, and Highwire Moon, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her essays have appeared in Harper's, Salon.com, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, the New York Times, and on NPR’s All Things Considered, as well as in the magazines Real Simple and Family Circle. Her short stories have appeared in McSweeney's and Zoetrope, among other publications. Her honors and awards include the California Book Prize, a Lannan Foundation Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, and a Best American Short Story Award. Straight was born in Riverside and lives there with her three daughters.

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Katherine Dunn

Thursday, March 26, 6:30 p.m.
Psychology 105

Katherine Dunn is interested in extremes. One Ring Circus, a collection of her essays on the sport of boxing will appear in early 2009. With photographer Jim Lommasson, Dunn won the 2004 Dorothea Lange–Paul Taylor documentary prize for the book Shadow Boxers: Sweat, Sacrifice, and the Will to Survive in America's Toughest Boxing Gyms. Her third novel, Geek Love, was a finalist for the 1989 National Book Award. Dunn attended Reed and was a member of the Class of 1968, but dropped out before graduating to travel and live in Central America and Europe. She has lived and worked for many years in Portland.

Matthew Dickman

Thursday, April 9, 6:30 p.m.
Psychology 105

Matthew Dickman’s first collection of poems, All American Poem, won the 2008 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize in Poetry, selected by Tony Hoagland. His chapbook, Amigos, was published in 2007 by Q Ave Press. Dickman’s poems appear in Tin House, Clackamas Literary Review, Agni Online, and The New Yorker, among others. A native of Portland, Oregon, he is the recipient of fellowships from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

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Endi Bogue Hartigan

Thursday, April 9, 6:30 p.m.
Psychology 105

Endi Bogue Hartigan’s first book, One Sun Storm (Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University, 2008), was selected for the 2008 Colorado Prize for Poetry by poet Martha Ronk. Hartigan's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Chicago Review, Free Verse, Gulf Coast, New Orleans Review, Insurance, TinFish, LVNG, Antioch Review, and Northwest Review, as well as other magazines and an anthology. She co-founded and edited Spectaculum, a magazine devoted to long poems and series. A member of Reed’s Class of 1992, and an M.F.A. recipient from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Hartigan has lived primarily on the West Coast and Hawaii, and now works and lives in Portland, with her husband and son.