Visiting writers come from near and far
It’s been a heady couple of weeks for the visiting writer scene in Spokane. Sherman Alexie was in town, helping Shann Ray launch his novel, “American Copper.” David Sedaris shared his brand of witty from the stage at the Bing Crosby Theater. Auntie’s this very weekend hosted readings by Seattle poet Linda Bierds and Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist (and novelist) Leonard Pitts Jr.
This week, we can look forward to greeting even more visitors.
Gonzaga University, meanwhile, will welcome Rattawut Lapcharoensap as part of its Visiting Writers Series on Thursday.
Lapcharoensap was born in Chicago, raised in Bangkok, Thailand, and now lives in Laramie, Wyoming, where he teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Wyoming. He is the author of the story collection “Sightseeing” (2005), based on his teenage years in Thailand. The book was well reviewed upon its release, with the Guardian opining, “This collection is intensely political and profoundly angry about the corrupt, poverty-stricken condition of Thailand, yet every story is primarily driven by a warmth and a belief in humanity that allows for unexpectedly uplifting and touching moments. That he achieves this without ever straying into kitsch is astonishing.”
Lapcharoensap has had short stories published in Zoetrope, Glimmer Train, the “Best New American Voices” collection, and Granta, who named him to its “Best of Young American Novelists” issue in 2007 – before he’d actually published a novel.
He will speak at 7:30 p.m. Thursday in the Cataldo Hall Globe Room on the Gonzaga campus, 502 E. Boone Ave. For more information, call (509) 313-6681. And mark your calendars: Next up in the series on Jan. 27 is Manuel Gonzales, the Texas-based author of “The Regional Office is Under Attack!” and “The Miniature Wife.”
From closer to home, Alex Kuo will be doing a swing through the Palouse and into Spokane reading from his new novel, “shanghai.shanghai.shanghai” (Redbat Books). The third in his “Ge” trilogy – following “Panda Diaries” and “The Man Who Dammed the Yangtze” – the book is structured as a series of episodes centering on Ge, described on Kuo’s website as a “culture writer and closet novelist,” as he encounters a variety of people (American evangelicals, a German naval attache, a pickpocket from Colombia) during his work on a newspaper.
Kuo is an award-winning poet – his collection “Lipstick and Other Stories” won the American Book Award in 2002 – and is a professor emeritus of creative writing at Washington State University. He has won three awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, and in the early 1990s taught in China as a Fulbright Scholar.
At 5:30 p.m. Monday, Kuo will read at WSU’s Goertzen Hall Room 21, in Pullman. Call (509) 335-0698 for more information. At 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, he’ll be at BookPeople, 521 S. Main St. in Moscow. Call (208) 882-2669. On Wednesday at 7 p.m., he’ll be in the Hixon Union Building’s Crow’s Nest on the Whitworth University campus, 300 Hawthorne Road on Spokane’s North Side. Call (509) 777-3253.
And from even closer to home, author S.M. Hulse will be the guest speaker on Friday during the next entry of the Eastern Washington University Visiting Writers Series. Hulse, who lives in Spokane, is the author of the novel “Black River,” which was long-listed for the 2015 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and was an Indie Next title and an Amazon Best Book of the Month. Hulse received her master’s degree from the University of Oregon and was a fiction fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her stories have appeared in Salamander, Willow Springs, and Witness. She is at work on her second novel. She’ll be at Auntie’s Bookstore, 402 W. Main Ave., at 7:30 p.m. Friday. Call (509) 838-0206 for more information.