Author Events
 |
RICHARD RUSSO |
|
|---|---|---|
|
Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Richard Russo has added a stop in Des Moines to his fall book tour and will be featured as an AViD Extra! for 2008. Richard Russo’s newest novel, Bridge of Sighs, will be released in paperback this fall. Join us at Hoyt Sherman Place Theater on Monday, October 6, at 7:00 PM. Russo, who lives in Maine, has been described as a masterful novelist with an uncanny sense of the way life works in the gritty industrial towns of the American Northeast. Russo’s previous works include six novels and one collection of short stories. His 2001 novel, Empire Falls, won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was adapted into an HBO mini-series, starring Paul Newman, Ed Harris, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and Helen Hunt. |
||
DON LAGO |
||
|---|---|---|
|
When his father developed Alzheimer’s disease, Don Lago realized that the stories and traditions of his Swedish ancestors would be lost along with the rest of his father’s memories. So he set out on a journey to research and reclaim his long-lost Scandinavian roots, exploring all facets of Scandinavian America—Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, and Icelandic—along the way. More than just a travel memoir, On the Viking Trail places Scandinavian immigrants and their history within the wider sweep of American culture. Lago’s amusing tales will remind readers of all ethnic backgrounds that to truly appreciate America one must never forget its immigrant past. Don Lago has been a political activist, book reviewer, kayaking instructor, researcher, and author. His essays on nature, science, and history have appeared in numerous magazines and journals, including Orion, Astronomy, Sky and Telescope, Smithsonian, Science Digest, and the Antioch Review. He currently lives in a cabin nestled in the pine forest outside Flagstaff, Arizona. |
||
|
Author Stephen Bloom and Photographer Peter Feldstein |
||
|---|---|---|
|
In 1984, Peter Feldstein set out to photograph every resident of his town, Oxford, Iowa (pop. 676). Twenty years later, he did it again. But this time those same residents did more than pose. With extraordinary honesty, they shared their memories, fantasies, failures, secrets and fears with writer Stephen G. Bloom. The result is a riveting collection of personal stories and portraits that tell much more than the tale of one small Midwestern town. Because beneath Oxford’s everyday surface, lives a complex and wondrous community that embodies the American spirit. A book called, The Oxford Project, has been published and will be launched on September 14. Described as being in the narrative tradition of Studs Terkel’s Working and the photographic spirit of Mike Disfarmer’s Heber Springs series, The Oxford Project is equal parts art, American history, cultural anthropology, and human narrative — at once personal and universal, surprising and predictable, simple and profound. Peter Feldstein is an artist working at the intersection of photography, drawing, printmaking, and digital imaging. Feldstein’s work has been shown in galleries across the country, at the Des Moines Art Center and has been included in group exhibitions at the Center for Creative Photography, Walker Art Center, and the Rhode Island School of Design. He has received an NEA Individual Artist’s Grant and two Polaroid Collection Grants. For more than three decades, Feldstein taught photography and digital imaging at the University of Iowa School of Art & Art History. Stephen G. Bloom is the author of Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America. He also is the author of a collection of nonfiction stories, Inside the Writer’s Mind. Tears of Mermaids: A Secret History (St. Martin’s Press) will be published in September 2009. Since 1993, Bloom has taught at the University of Iowa, where he specializes in narrative writing. |
||