Please join us for the final event in the Spring 2019 Hallie Ford Literary Series at Willamette University, a reading by fiction writer Justin Taylor, plus a celebration of the winners of this year’s Frank H. Newell Creative Writing Prizes. The event will take place on Thursday, April 4, at 7:30 p.m. in the Hatfield Room of Willamette’s library and is free and open to the public. Books will be for sale courtesy of the Willamette Store.

Justin Taylor is the author of two story collections, Flings and Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever, as well as a novel, The Gospel of Anarchy. His newest book, Riding with the Ghost, will be published in 2020. His stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in some of the most prestigious venues in the nation, including The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, Harper’s, The Sewanee Review, and n+1. Justin is currently the 2018-19 Mark & Melody Teppola Distinguished Visiting Professor at Willamette, teaching courses in creative writing and English literature, and he serves as the fiction editor of the Literary Review.

Here’s how Publisher’s Weekly describes Justin’s book Flings: “Contemporary, intelligent, and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny. These stories, by turns witty and piercing, together form an uncommon portrait of the human heart.”

Read an interview with Justin here: https://fictionwritersreview.com/interview/guided-by-voices-an-interview-with-justin-taylor/

Prior to Justin’s reading, we will celebrate the winners of this year’s Frank H. Newell Creative Writing Prizes, for which Justin served as a judge. The winners will receive their prizes and read brief excerpts from their winning stories:

First place: Claire Alongi, for “A Selective Investigation of the Causes and Effects of Keraunographic Markings Upon a Teenage Subject (Female)”

Second place: Kevin Alexander, for “The Field Study”

Third place: Emily Korn, for “A Word for Change”

About Frank H. Newell:

Mr. Newell graduated from Willamette University in 1949, and subsequently enjoyed a 58-year run in the newspaper and broadcast business. He got his start at Salem’s Capital Journal, where he began in the advertising department. Over the years, he worked his way up through the ranks, and ultimately served as publisher of several news outlets across the nation over his long and successful career. Mr. Newell did not slow down in retirement, however, and at 93, saw his first novel published. He has long had a love for fiction writing, with a particular emphasis on short stories, and wants to foster this interest in future generations of Willamette University students.

Please join us on Thursday, March 14th, at 4:15 p.m. in the Hatfield Room for “Poetry and Social Justice: a reading and conversation with Sarah Browning”.

Presenter: Sarah Browning

Can poetry stop war? Can poets change the world? How do we create inclusive spaces? How do we organize our communities to reclaim our power?

Join us for a reading and conversation with poet, anti-war activist, and community organizing extraordinaire Sarah Browning.

Sarah Browning is the author of Killing Summer (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017) and Whiskey in the Garden of Eden (The Word Works, 2007). She is co-founder and for 10 years was Executive Director of Split This Rock: Poems of Provocation & Witness. She is an Associate Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies and recipient of fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities, Mesa Refuge, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, among others. She has been guest editor or co-edited special issues of Beltway Poetry Quarterly, The Delaware Poetry Review, and three issues of POETRY magazine. This event is free and open to the public.

For more information, please contact salmutawa@willamette.edu.

Please join us for the second in this spring’s Hallie Ford Literary Series at Willamette University. The Art of Editing Thursday, March 7, 2019, at 7:30 p.m. in the Hatfield Room.

Legendary editor and Salem native Gary Fisketjon will discuss his career in editing and book publishing. Fisketjon, who created the Vintage Contemporaries series for Random House, has published some of contemporary literature’s best-known writers, from Raymond Carver and Richard Ford to Donna Tartt and Haruki Murakami. He is currently editor-at-large for Alfred A. Knopf.

The following events are free and open to the public.
Contact Information:
Name: Scott Nadelson
Phone: 503-370-6290

Please join us for the first in this spring’s Hallie Ford Literary Series at Willamette University. New Voices / Alumni Showcase, an evening with Lena Khalaf Tuffaha & Gabriel Tallent on Wednesday, February 6, 2019, at 7:30 p.m. in the Hatfield Room.

Two of our own return to campus to read from their highly acclaimed first books. Palestinian-American poet Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, who studied at Willamette in the mid-1990s, recently won the Washington Book Award for her poetry volume Water and Salt. Gabriel Tallent, a 2010 graduate, published his first novel, My Absolute Darling, to widespread acclaim, receiving praise in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and National Public Radio. Books will be for sale, courtesy of the Willamette Store. I hope to see you there.

Contact Information:
Name: Scott Nadelson
Phone: 503-370-6290

Please join us for the third and final event of the Fall 2018 Hallie Ford Literary Series at Willamette University, a reading by Iranian-American memoirist and novelist Jasmin Darznik. The reading will take place on Thursday, November 8, at 7:30 p.m. in the Hatfield Room of Willamette’s library. The event is free and open to the public, and books will be for sale courtesy of the Willamette Store.

Jasmin is the author of a New York Times bestselling memoir, The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother’s Hidden Life, about her discovery of her mother’s teenage marriage and a half-sister left behind in Iran following the 1979 Islamic Revolution. This past spring, she published her first novel, Song of a Captive Bird, which fictionalizes the real-life story of Farough Farrokzhad, a trailblazing poet who is considered the godmother of Iranian feminism.

Born in Tehran before coming to America at five years old, Jasmin holds an MFA in fiction from Bennington College and a Ph.D. in English from Princeton University. Now a professor of English and creative writing at California College of the Arts, she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family.

Here’s what the New York Times Book Review has to say about her novel: “Song of a Captive Bird is a complex and beautiful rendering of [a] vanished country and its scattered people; a reminder of the power and purpose of art; and an ode to female creativity under a patriarchy that repeatedly tries to snuff it out.”

Need more enticement? Read one of Jasmin’s essays here or listen to her discuss her memoir on NPR here.

Please join us for an evening with Gary Soto; Wednesday October 24, 2018 at 7:30 p.m. at the Hatfield Library.

Gary Soto is a celebrated poet, essayist, memoirist, and children’s author best known for his reflections on the Chicano experience. The author of more than twenty books, his most recent titles are the poetry collection “You Kiss By Th’ Book: New poems from Shakespear’s Line” and the essay collection “Why I Don’t Write Children’s Literature“. His “New and Selected Poems” was a finalist for the National Book Award.

Contact Information:
Name: Scott Nadelson
Phone: 503-370-6290

Sufism and Islamic Law: Tempering Legal Decision Making with the Jurist’s Knowledge of God

A lecture by Fareeha Khan

Thursday, October 4, 5 pm
Hatfield Room
Mark O. Hatfield Library

Sufism was as much a part of the life and blood of Muslim societies as Islamic law in pre-modern times. On a daily basis, it was what reminded both the lay and scholar Muslim what the point was in following Islamic legal rulings:  to worship and submit oneself to God. Unfortunately, due to various modern intellectual trends, Sufism no longer holds such a central level of importance among many of today’s Muslims. This lecture will examine a prominent modern-day case of Islamic legal reform in which the motivating factor was the jurist’s deep spirituality and practice of Sufism. I argue that a revival of such spiritually-inspired jurisprudence is necessary for the holistic survival of Islam in the modern day.

Fareeha Khan is an independent scholar affiliated with Willamette University in Salem, Oregon. Her research interests include Islamic law, gender, and the place of traditional Islamic scholarship in the modern day. She is the author of several academic articles, is currently serving as Advisory Editor for the Oxford Encyclopedia of Islamic Law, and is preparing her first book-length manuscript for publication, entitled The Ethical Contours of a Fatwa: Gender, Sufism and Islamic Law in Late Colonial India. Dr. Khan currently resides in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

The Facebook event page is here.  This event is sponsored by Willamette University’s Religious Studies Department, and is free and open to the public.

Please join us for an evening with Asali Solomon on Wednesday, October 3, 2018 at 7:30 PM at the Hatfield Room.

Asali Solomon is the author of the novel “Disgruntled” and the story collection “Get Down“, which was a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction and received a Rona Jaffee Foundation Writers Award. In 2007, she was named one of the National Book Foundation’s 5 under 35. Solomon teaches English literature and creative writing at Haverford College.

Contact Information:
Name: Scott Nadelson
Phone: 503-370-6290