2015-2016 English Reading Series
Reading & Book Signing by Ann Pancake
Location
Library and Gallery, Albin O. Kuhn
Date & Time
October 29, 2015, 5:00 pm – 6:00 pm
Description
Please join us for the first event in our 2015-2016 English Department Reading Series, a reading and book signing by fiction writer Ann Pancake. This event will take place on October 29th from 5:00 to 6:00 PM in the Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery and refreshments will be served.
Ann Pancake grew up
in Romney and Summersville, West Virginia. Her new short story collection, Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley, was
published in February 2015 with Counterpoint Press.
Her first novel, Strange As This Weather Has Been (Counterpoint
2007), features a West Virginia family devastated by mountaintop removal
mining. Based on interviews and real events, the novel was one of Kirkus
Review's Top Ten Fiction Books of 2007, won the 2007 Weatherford Award, and was
a finalist for the 2008 Orion Book Award.
Pancake's collection of
short stories, Given Ground, won
the 2000 Bakeless Award, and she has also received a Whiting Award, an NEA
Grant, a Pushcart Prize, and creative writing fellowships from the states of
Washington, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Her fiction and essays have
appeared in journals and anthologies like Agni, The Georgia
Review, Poets and Writers, Narrative, and New Stories from the
South. She earned her BA in English at West Virginia University and a PhD. in
English Literature from the University of Washington. She lives in Seattle.
Of her work, Ron Rash, New York Times bestselling author
of Burning Bright, writes: “Ann
Pancake knows the ways of her people inside and out, but her stories are always
linked to the universal concerns of the human heart, and they are rendered in
voices that are often wildly original, always poetic. Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley, is further
confirmation that Ann Pancake is one of America’s finest writers.”
And novelist Dan Chaon
notes: “These are astonishing stories — tender, alive, full of heart
and empathy but never sentimental, full of clenched drama and secrets and
surprises, but always subtle, full of knotty, poetic language, but also
remarkably naturalistic. In her unflinching and lovingly astute attention to
the lives of the working poor, people who have fallen entirely beneath the
radar of our literary notice, she occasionally calls to mind the haunting
photographs of Walker Evans, but I don’t think there’s anyone else like
Ann in American letters. She is a true original, and I urge you with all
my heart to read these gorgeous stories. Ann Pancake is one of the best we
have.”
Thanks to the following
departments for their support of this reading: The English Department, the
Dresher Center for the Humanities, Gender and Women’s Studies, and Geography and Environmental Systems.
