Valley Library Rotunda
201 SW Waldo Pl, Corvallis

Peter Nathaniel Malae is the author of three novels: Son of Amity (Oregon State University Press, 2018), Our Frail Blood (Grove/Atlantic, 2013), and What We Are(Grove/Atlantic, 2010), which won the San Francisco Foundation's Joseph Henry Jackson Award, was a New York Times Editors' Choice, and a Pacific Northwest Booksellers finalist. His story collection, Teach the Free Man (Swallow/Ohio University Press, 2007), was a finalist for the New York Public Library's Young Lions Award and was named a notable book by the Story Prize. His play, The Question (2015), won the Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship for Drama. He is a former John Steinbeck, MacDowell Colony, and Arts Council Silicon Valley Fellow.
 

Clemens Starck is a Princeton drop-out, a former merchant seaman and a reporter on Wall Street. He has worked mostly as a union carpenter and construction foreman on the West Coast—San Francisco, British Columbia, and Oregon. His carpentry work also includes a long stint as a maintenance carpenter at OSU. His first book of poems, Journeyman’s Wages, received the 1996 Oregon Book Award as well as the William Stafford Memorial Poetry Award from the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association. His next two books—Studying Russian on Company Time (1999) and China Basin(2002)—were also finalists for the Oregon Book Award. Additional books of poems include: Traveling Incognito (2004), Rembrandt, Chainsaw (2011), and Old Dogs, New Tricks (2016). Starck has also produced two audio CDs of himself reading his poems against a musical background: Looking for Parts (2008) and Getting It Straight (2013). November 2018 is the publication date for his newest volume, Cathedrals & Parking Lots: Collected Poems. It contains all the poems from his previous six books plus a few new poems. A widower, he has three grown children and lives in a 19th century farmhouse he has rebuilt on forty-some acres in the country outside of Dallas, Oregon, in the mid-Willamette Valley.

The event is free and open to the public. Grass Roots will have books available for purchase. 

LaSells Stewart Center
875 SW 26th St, Corvallis

Bell is a writer, director, and comedian who is the host and executive producer of the Emmy Award winning CNN docu-series United Shades of America with W. Kamau Bell. He is a frequent political commentator and just made his Netflix debut with a new stand-up comedy special, Private School Negro. Bell recently published a book with the easy-to-remember title, The Awkward Thoughts of W. Kamau Bell: Tales of a 6' 4", African American, Heterosexual, Cisgender, Left-Leaning, Asthmatic, Black and Proud Blerd, Mama's Boy, Dad, and Stand-Up Comedian. He has hosted three critically acclaimed podcasts: Kamau Right Now!, Politically Re-Active, and Denzel Washington is The Greatest Actor of All Time Period. Bell is on the advisory board of Hollaback! and Donors Choose and is the ACLU Celebrity Ambassador for Racial Justice. The New York Times called Bell “the most promising new talent in political comedy in many years.” 

Admission is free, and the event is open to the public, but tickets are required to attend. 

Grass Roots will be providing books for sale at this event.

Black Box Theater, Withycombe Hall at OSU
2901 SW Campus Way, Corvallis, OR

Tomás Q. Morín is the author of Patient Zero and A Larger Country, winner of the APR/Honickman Prize and runner-up for the PEN Osterweil Award. He translated Pablo Neruda’s The Heights of Macchu Picchu and the opera Pancho Villa from a Safe Distance. With Mari L’Esperance, he co-edited Coming Close: Forty Essays on Philip Levine. He is at work on a memoir about fathers. In 2020 he will be a Civitella Fellow in Italy. He teaches at Drew University and in the low residency MFA program of Vermont College of Fine Arts.

This second collection from APR-Honickman winner Tomas Q. Morin explores love gone sideways in the lives of lovers, parents and children, humans and the divine. Patient Zero is filled with voices--of all the people, places, and things that surround a life sick with heartbreak. Doors are the wooden tongues of a house, grocery-store cashiers are gatekeepers to the infinite, and food is the all-powerful life force behind every living thing. This poignant, sometimes comic, meditation examines the joys and sorrows of loving another person in rich, microscopic detail.

The event is free and open to the public. Grass Roots will have books available for purchase.

Learning Innovation Center Rm 128
165 SW Sackett Pl.
Corvallis, OR
 

Keith Scribner has taught in OSU’s MFA program since its founding.  He’s the author of four novels, the most recent, Old Newgate Road, will be published in January 2019. His previous novel The Oregon Experiment is set in a fictionalized Corvallis and a university that bears some resemblance to our own. His books appear in translation and his novel The Goodlife was selected for the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers series, and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

Scribner received his BA from Vassar College and MFA from the University of Montana. He was awarded Wallace Stegner and John L’Heureux Fellowships in Fiction at Stanford University, where he went on to teach in the Creative Writing Program as a Jones Lecturer.  He loves living in Corvallis.

 

Gary Fisketjon worked at Random House, Vintage Books, and the Atlantic Monthly Press until 1990, when he joined Alfred A. Knopf, where he is now Vice President and Editor at Large. Authors he has published have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Booker Prize, the Nobel Prize, the Award in Literature and the E.M. Forster Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Wallace Stegner Award, the John Dos Passos Prize, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Minnesota Book Award, the Mississippi Authors Award, the California Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award, the  Southeastern Booksellers Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Commonwealth Prize, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, the PEN/Saul Bellow Award, the Richard Wright Award, the Rea Award, the Prix Médicis, the Prix Femina, the Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine, the Jerusalem Prize, and the Yomiuri Literary Prize.

 

The event is free and open to the public. Grass Roots will have books available for purchase. 
 

Grass Roots Books
227 SW 2nd Street
 

“The earth trembles. She tastes metal. That’s how it starts on a moonless Sunday in Clearing, Oregon, in the shadow of the dormant volcano locals call Broken Mountain.”

IF, THEN centers on four neighbors—an ambitious surgeon, her husband who is a wildlife scientist, their young neighbor reeling from the recent death of her mother, and another neighbor who is a new mother—and how they find their lives upended when they begin to see themselves in a parallel reality. At first the visions are relatively benign, but they grow increasingly troubling and more frequent. And when a natural disaster threatens them all, it becomes clear that the visions were not what they first seemed, and their hometown will never be the same. IF, THEN is about the choices we make that shape our lives, as well as a reimagining of the forces we can control—and those we cannot.

 

Kate Hope Day holds a BA from Bryn Mawr College and a PhD in English from the University of Pittsburgh. She was an associate producer at HBO. She lives in Oregon with her husband and their two children.