New Voices Showcase: Rabins & Bernard

Please join us for the third event in the Fall 2015 Hallie Ford Literary Series at Willamette, a New Voices Showcase, featuring poet Alicia Jo Rabins and fiction writer Sean Bernard. The reading and Q&A will take place on Monday, November 9, at 7:30 p.m. in the Hatfield Room of Willamette’s library. It is free and open to the public, and books will be for sale courtesy of the Willamette Store.

A writer, composer, performer and Torah scholar, Alicia Jo Rabins won the 2015 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize. Her first volume of poetry, Divinity School, was published this October. She tours internationally with her band, performing Girls in Trouble, an indie-folk song cycle about the complicated lives of Biblical women. A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff, her one-woman chamber-rock opera, was named one of Portland’s best theatre performances of 2014 by the Willamette Week.

Sean Bernard is the author of two books released in the last year: a novel, Studies in the Hereafter, and a story collection, Desert Sonorous, which won the 2014 Juniper Prize from the University of Massachusetts Press. He lives and teaches creative writing in Southern California, where he serves as Fiction Editor for The Los Angeles Review and also edits the journal Prism Review. He holds degrees from Oregon State University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and his fiction has appeared in Epoch, CutBank, LIT, Glimmer Train, and Sequestrum. In 2012, he received a literary fellowship from the NEA.

Read one of Alicia’s poems here: https://aprweb.org/poems/florida; or listen to her songs here: http://www.girlsintroublemusic.com/listen/.

Read an interview with Sean here: http://therumpus.net/2015/10/the-rumpus-interview-with-sean-bernard/.

Scott Nadelson
Associate Professor of English;
Department Chair of English