All events are 4:00-5:45 pm in Humanities Lecture Hall 206. For more information, email meperks@ucsc.edu
October 9: Ariel Gore
October 23: Andrew Lam, Kate Gale
October 30: Tobias Wolff
November 6: Helene Wecker
November 13: ASL Performer Patrick Graybill, Interpreter Aaron Brace
November 20: Kelly Link, Kim Stanley Robinson, Karen Joy Fowler
December 4: Katie Crouch
December 11: Student Reading
Ariel Gore
Ariel Gore is the editor & publisher of the Alternative Press Award-winning magazine Hip Mama and the author of eight books. Her latest, The End of Eve, chronicles her years spent caring for her dying mother. The memoir has been called “Terms of Endearment meets Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?”
She’s also edited half a dozen anthologies, including Breeder (Seal Press), The People’s Apocalypse (Lit Star Press), and the LAMBDA-award winning Portland Queer (Lit Star Press).
Ariel lives in Oakland, California, and teaches online at Ariel Gore’s School for Wayward Writers.
Andrew Lam
Andrew Lam is the author of Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora, which won the 2006 PEN Open Book Award, and East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres. Lam is an editor and cofounder of New America Media, an association of over three thousand ethnic media outlets in America. He was a regular commentator on NPR’s All Things Considered for many years, and was the subject of a 2004 PBS documentary called My Journey Home. His essays have appeared in newspapers and magazines such as The New York Times, The LA Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Baltimore Sun, The Atlanta Journal, the Chicago Tribune, Mother Jones, and The Nation, among many others. Birds of Paradise Lost is his first story collection. He lives in San Francisco.
Kate Gale
Dr. Kate Gale is Managing Editor of Red Hen Press, Editor of the Los Angeles Review and President of the American Composers Forum, LA. She teaches in the Low Residency MFA program at the University of Nebraska in Poetry, Fiction and Creative Non-Fiction. She serves on the boards of A Room of Her Own Foundation, the School of Arts and Humanities of Claremont Graduate University and Poetry Society of America.
She is author of six books of poetry (her most recent, The Goldilocks Zone, University of New Mexico Press), a novel Lake of Fire, and six librettos including Rio de Sangre, a libretto for an opera with composer Don Davis which had its world premiere October 2010 at the Florentine Opera in Milwaukee.
Kate lives in Los Angeles with her husband and children.
Tobias Wolff
Tobias Wolff is the author of the novels The Barracks Thief and Old School, the memoirs This Boy’s Life and In Pharaoh’s Army, and the short story collections In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, Back in the World, and The Night in Question. His most recent collection of short stories, Our Story Begins, won The Story Prize for 2008. Other honors include the PEN/Malamud Award and the Rea Award – both for excellence in the short story – the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the PEN/Faulkner Award. He has also been the editor of Best American Short Stories, The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories, and A Doctor’s Visit: The Short Stories of Anton Chekhov. His work appears regularly in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, and other magazines and literary journals.
Helene Wecker
Helene Wecker grew up in Libertyville, Illinois, a small town north of Chicago, and received her Bachelor’s in English from Carleton College in Minnesota. After graduating, she worked a number of marketing and communications jobs in Minneapolis and Seattle before deciding to return to her first love, fiction writing. Accordingly, she moved to New York to pursue a Master’s in fiction at Columbia University.
She now lives near San Francisco with her husband and daughter. Her first novel, THE GOLEM AND THE JINNI, was published in 2013 by HarperCollins.
Patrick Graybill
Patrick Graybill is a pioneer in ASL performance through his early work with the National Theater of the Deaf. He is a prolific translator of English to ASL, and a teacher of other poets, having taught for many years at the National Technological Institute of the Deaf in Rochester, New York (one of two American universities, along with Gallaudet, where sign is the official language). Graybill’s work is an important influence on later generations of ASL poets.
Aaron Brace
Aaron Brace has been interpreting for over 30 years, primarily as a community and conference interpreter and also for six years as a designated interpreter for a university professor. He credits Patrick Graybill, Ted Supalla, and the Deaf communities of Rochester, NY and the San Francisco Bay Area for making him the interpreter he is today. While it’s debatable whether he deserves his reputation, it's absolutely true that he hasn't always.
Kelly Link
Kelly Link is the author of three collections of short stories, Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners, and Pretty Monsters. Her short stories have won three Nebulas, a Hugo, and a World Fantasy Award. She was born in Miami, Florida, and once won a free trip around the world by answering the question “Why do you want to go around the world?” (“Because you can’t go through it.”)
Link and her family live in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she and her husband, Gavin J. Grant, run Small Beer Press, and play ping-pong. In 1996 they started the occasional zine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.
Kim Stanley Robinson
Kim Stanley Robinson is a winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards. He is the author of eleven previous books, including the bestselling Mars trilogy and the critically acclaimed Fifty Degrees Below, Forty Signs of Rain, The Years of Rice and Salt, and Antarctica--for which he was sent to the Antarctic by the U.S. National Science Foundation as part of their Antarctic Artists and Writers' Program. He lives in Davis, California.
Karen Joy Fowler
Karen Joy Fowler is the author of six novels and three short story collections. The Jane Austen Book Club spent thirteen weeks on the New York Times bestsellers list and was a New York Times Notable Book. Fowler’s previous novel, Sister Noon, was a finalist for the 2001 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction. Her debut novel, Sarah Canary, was a New York Times Notable Book, as was her second novel, The Sweetheart Season. Fowler’s short story collection Black Glass won the World Fantasy Award in 1999, and her collection What I Didn’t See won the World Fantasy Award in 2011. Her most recent novel, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, has been short-listed for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2014. Fowler and her husband, who have two grown children and five grandchildren, live in Santa Cruz, California.
Katie Crouch
Katie Crouch is a New York Times bestselling novelist and essayist. Her books include Girls in Trucks, Men and Dogs, and Abroad. She has also written two novels for young adults, and has contributed to The London Guardian, The San Francisco Chronicle, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Slate, Salon and Glamour. She has a regular column on The Rumpus called “Missed”. A MacDowell Fellow and alumnae of Brown University and the Columbia MFA program, Katie lives with her family in Bolinas, California.
