Novelist, translator and poet Jaimy Gordon will read from her work at 8 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 30, for The Writing Program Reading Series at Washington University in St. Louis. In addition, Gordon will give a talk on the craft of fiction at 8 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 6.
Both events — which are sponsored by The Writing Program and Department of English, both in Arts & Sciences — are free and open to the public and take place in Hurst Lounge, Room 201, Duncker Hall, on Washington University’s Hilltop Campus. A book-signing and reception will follow each, and copies of Gordon’s works will be available for purchase. Duncker Hall is located at the northwest corner of Brookings Quadrangle, near the intersection of Brookings and Hoyt drives. For more information, call (314) 935-7130.
Gordon is the author of two novels, most recently She Drove Without Stopping; a novella, Circumspection from an Equestrian Statue; and a narrative poem, The Bend, The Lip, The Kid. She has received two grants for her fiction from the National Endowment for the Arts and been a fellow of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Mass., and the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College. She currently teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Western Michigan University.
“Jaimy Gordon is a daring wing-walker of a prose stylist, death-defying and sure-footed,” observes Kellie Wells, Ph.D., assistant professor of English. “After reading a book, a paragraph, even a sentence of hers, you too feel accomplished and brave, as though you’d scaled a heady and impossible height and survived to boast of it.
“Her novels are capacious and wise, and the high-velocity, lyrically rollicking picaresque adventures invite all lion-hearted lovers of language to sally forth, with Jane Turner, heroine of She Drove Without Stopping, dejected Adventuress and hatcher of patricidal plots, or Ursie Koderer, the Bogeywoman, sexually vexed ‘girlgoyle’ who carves on her forearms a map for escaping her own monstrosity as she idles in the bughouse for the selectively mad. Jaimy Gordon is a writer of extraordinary gifts.”