Literary Voices

A Benefit for the Libraries by the Friends of the Libraries
Saturday April 24, 2010, 6pm at the UW Club

Presenting Partners:

For Event Underwriting opportunities, contact Joyce Agee at 206-616-6521.

Author Biographies

Timothy Egan (Keynote Speaker) worked for 18 years as a writer for The New York Times, first as the Pacific Northwest correspondent, then as a national enterprise reporter. In 2006, Mr. Egan won the National Book Award for his history of people who lived through the Dust Bowl years, The Worst Hard Time. In 2001, he won the Pulitzer Prize as part of a team of reporters who wrote the series How Race Is Lived in America. Egan is the author of five books, including The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest, and Lasso the Wind, Away to the New West.

Paul Bannick is the author and the photographer for The Owl and The Woodpecker: Encounters With North America's Most Iconic Birds. He is an award-winning photographer whose work has appeared in dozens of books and magazines including the Smithsonian Guide to North American Birds, The National Wildlife Federation Guide to North American Birds, Audubon magazine, Sunset magazine, Pacific Northwest magazine, as well as in many other books, magazines, parks, refuges and other places in North America and Europe. Paul works full-time for Conservation Northwest, a conservation 501(c)(3) dedicated to protecting and connecting wild areas from the Pacific Coast to the Canadian Rockies. Paul is a fourth generation Seattleite who graduated from the University of Washington in 1986 with a degree in Business Administration.  Before dedicating his life to conservation, Paul worked 15 years in the computer software industry as one of the first 75 employees of Aldus Corporation and later Adobe Systems and Microsoft.

A Seattle native, Knute Berger has long been a writer and editor for local magazines and newspapers. Now he's distilled some of those ruminations in the book Pugetopolis: A Mossback Takes on Growth Addicts, Weather Wimps, and the Myth of Seattle Nice. The collection presents 17 years' worth of new and past essays culled from Berger's stints as editor of Seattle Weekly and Eastsideweek; regular commentator on KUOW's Weekday; and columnist for Seattle Magazine, Washington Law and Politics and the online journal Crosscut.

Sherwin Bitsui is originally from White Cone, Arizona on the Navajo Nation . He holds an AFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts Creative Writing Program. He is the recipient of the 2000-01 Individual Poet Grant from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, the 1999 Truman Capote Creative Writing Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Literary Residency Fellowship and more recently, a 2006 Whiting Writers' Award. Sherwin has published his poems in American Poet, The Iowa Review, Frank (Paris), Lit Magazine and elsewhere. His poems were also anthologized in Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century. Shapeshift, from University of Arizona Press, is his first book. His second volume of poetry, Floodsong, will be released from Copper Canyon Press soon.

Nicolette Bromberg was born in Olympia, Washington during the worst snowstorm to hit the northwest, lived near Mt. St. Helens when it blew up, had a tornado interrupt a conference she was attending, and one month after she came to work at the University of Washington Libraries Special Collections, the Nisqually Earthquake happened.  Despite these natural disasters, she worked for 10 years at the University of Kansas Library as the Photo Archivist, and for eight years at the Wisconsin Historical Society as the Visual Materials Curator before returning to the Pacific Northwest to become the Visual Materials Curator for the UW Libraries. While at the Wisconsin Historical Society she organized and managed the Wisconsin Sesquicentennial Rephotography Project, a state-wide photography project, and wrote two books about it, Wisconsin Revisited and Then and Now, The Wisconsin Sesquicentennial Rephotography Project. Her recent book, Picturing the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition: the Photographs of Frank H. Nowell, is about the official photographer and the photography of the AYPE.

Ellen Dissanayake is an independent scholar whose work focuses on the anthropological exploration of art and culture. She is an affiliate professor in the University of Washington's School of Music, and is the author of three books, What Is Art For?, Homo Aestheticus and Art and Intimacy, all published by the University of Washington Press. She has taught at the New School for Social Research in New York City, the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, Sarah Lawrence College, the National Arts School in Papua New Guinea, and the University of Peradeniya in Sri Lanka. Her work emerged out of her lived experience in the countries Sri Lanka, Nigeria, India, Madagascar, and Papua New Guinea, where she observed, firsthand, the cultural differences and attitudes toward art and culture amongst this variety of peoples.

Curtis Ebbesmeyer holds a Ph.D. in oceanography from the University of Washington. Media worldwide have turned to his expertise on ocean currents and floating objects. Each year, Curt presents a booth and talks at beachcomber fairs in Alaska, Florida, and Washington, as well as hosting the radio program Flotsam Hour, in which listeners call in with interesting flotsam (like Antiques Roadshow for ocean currents). Four times a year he publishes a newsletter, Beachcombers' Alert!™, telling of interesting flotsam reported to the headquarters of the Beachcombers' and Oceanographers' International Association. Reporting flotsam to the Beachcombers' Alert! blog will provide information for future issues of the Beachcombers' Alert!™

Stephanie Kallos spent twenty years in the theatre as an actress and teacher of voice, speech and accents. Her short fiction has been awarded a Raymond Carver Award and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her first novel, Broken for You, won the Washington State and Pacific Northwest Booksellers Awards and was chosen by Sue Monk Kidd as a “Today Show” book club selection. Her second novel, Sing Them Home, was an Indie Next selection and a Shelf Awareness Pick of the Year. Stephanie lives in Seattle with her husband and sons and is at work on her third novel.

Lyanda Lynn Haupt is an author, speaker and naturalist based in Seattle. Her new book, from Little, Brown, Crow Planet: Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness was released this year. Her first book,Rare Encounters with Ordinary Birds (Sasquatch, 2001), explores the relationship between humans, birds, and ecological understanding, and is a winner of the 2002 Washington State Book Award. Her second book,Pilgrim on the Great Bird Continent: The Importance of Everything and Other Lessons from Darwin's Lost Notebooks, was published by Little, Brown to positive reviews nationwide, and continues to receive broad mention as Darwin's 200th birthday is celebrated this year. Lyanda has created and directed educational programs for Seattle Audubon, worked in raptor rehabilitation in Vermont, and as a seabird researcher for the Fish and Wildlife Service in the remote tropical Pacific. Her writing has appeared in Image, Open Spaces, Wild Earth, Conservation Biology Journal, Birdwatcher's Digest, and Prairie Naturalist.

Lesley Hazelton is a former psychologist and political journalist with deep roots in both Judaism and Catholicism. She writes in the introduction to her biography of Mary, “a Jew who once seriously considered becoming a rabbi, a former convent schoolgirl who daydreamed about being a nun, an agnostic with a deep sense of religious mystery through no affinity for organized religion.” Born in England, she reported from Israel for Time magazine, specializing in religious, social and cultural issues, and has since written feature articles on Middle East politics for among others, The New York Times, Esquire, Vanity Fair, The Nation, The New Republic, Harper's, and The New York Review of Books. Her most recent book is After the Prophet: the Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam (Doubleday 2009). Other books include the award-winning Jeruslaem, Jerusalem, Where Mountains Roar and Jezebel —widely praised for their blend of insight, in-depth reporting, and fine writing.

Heather McHugh is the Milliman Distinguished Writer-in-Residence in the Creative Writing Program of the English Department at the University of Washington. She was named a 2009 MacArthur Fellow by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Her books of poetry include Eyeshot (2003), which was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, and The Father of the Predicaments (1999). Another book, Hinge & Sign: Poems 1968-1993 (1994), won the Boston Book Review's Bingham Poetry Prize and the Pollack-Harvard Review Prize. It was also a finalist for the National Book Award and named a "notable Book of the Year" by The New York Times Book Review. Her latest collection of poems, Upgraded to Serious, will be published shortly by Copper Canyon Press and by House of Anansi in Canada. McHugh's other awards include two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Griffin Prize for Poetry and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2007 she was among the first recipients of a United States Artists Fellowship.

Doug Nufer writes fiction, poetry, and pieces for performance.  Most of his work is based on formal constraints and other odd procedures. The most extreme example of this may be Never Again (Black Square/ Four Walls Eight Windows, 2004), where no word appears more than once.  Other novels include Negativeland (Autonomedia, 2004), On the Roast (Chiasmus, 2004), and a double novel in the old Ace doubles flip-over format, The Mudflat Man/ The River Boys, soultheft, 2006).  He's also the author of a poetry collection, We Were Werewolves (Make Now, LA, 2008), and a forthcoming novel, By Kelman Out of Pessoa (Les Figues, LA, 2010).  In the last few years he has performed with choreographer Erin Mitchell and her dance company in Seattle and New York -- speaking, not dancing.  He lives in Seattle and sells wine.

Art Thiel has been a sports columnist for more than two decades with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer before its print demise in March 2009. Art continues to write for its digital successor, seattlepi.com. His first book in 2003, Out of Left Field, on the rise of the Seattle Mariners, was a regional best seller. A new book, The Great Book of Seattle Sports Lists, co-authored with Mike Gastineau and Steve Rudman, is the first comprehensive account of the sports history of the city and state. He also is heard regularly on KPLU-FM and ESPN710 Seattle.

Coll Thrush is the author of Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place, which won the 2007 Washington State Book Award for History and Biography, and co-editor of Phantom Pasts, Indigenous Presence: Native American Ghosts and Hauntings in North American History and Culture, forthcoming from the University of Nebraska Press. He has also published on Northwest Coast topics ranging from seismology to food, and is currently involved in two large research projects: an interdisciplinary collaboration examining the environmental history of the Strait of Georgia and a history of London, England, framed through the experiences of Indigenous visitors from Canada, the United States, Australia, and Aotearoa/New Zealand. In his free time, Coll is an avid musician, performing with Katari Taiko, Canada's oldest Japanese drumming ensemble.

Sasha Welland has been a member of the Women Studies faculty (with a joint appointment in Anthropology) since 2006. She has a Ph.D. in Anthropology from UC Santa Cruz (2006) and an MA in Anthropology from UC Santa Cruz (1998). Her research interests are Feminist ethnography and oral history, visual and expressive culture, transnational feminisms, China/East Asia, Asian America. Awards include an Artist Trust Grants for Artist Projects (GAP) Program, Washington State, 2005 and a Humanities Fellowship, Asian Cultural Council, for Cruel/Loving Bodies exhibition, 2004 and the China & Inner Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies, 2003. She is the author of A Thousand Miles of Dreams: The Journeys of Two Chinese Sisters (Rowman and Littlefield, 2006).
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