Corvallis-Benton Library Main Meeting Room

645 NW Monroe Ave, Corvallis, OR 97330
 

In the spring of 1885, seventeen-year-old Jessilyn Harney finds herself orphaned and alone on her family’s homestead. Desperate to fend off starvation and predatory neighbors, she cuts off her hair, binds her chest, saddles her beloved mare, and sets off across the mountains to find her outlaw brother Noah and bring him home.

Wrestling with her brother’s outlaw identity, and haunted by questions about her own, Jess must outmaneuver those who underestimate her, ultimately rising to become a hero in her own right.

Told in Jess’s wholly original and unforgettable voice, Whiskey When We’re Dry is a stunning achievement, an epic as expansive as America itself–and a reckoning with the myths that are entwined with our history.
 

John Larison was born in Oregon.  The son of National Geographic filmmakers, much of his childhood was spent traveling, often staying in remote tropical or mountainous regions. He attended the University of Oregon and studied philosophy and literature, and stayed to earn a Master’s of Education. For several years, he worked as a fly-fishing guide and high school English teacher, writing fiction in the evenings.  In 2005, he left both jobs to earn a MFA at Oregon State University.

To piece together a living in the years following, Larison worked as a freelance writer for outdoor magazines, an adjunct writing instructor, and a fly-fishing guide, specializing in running small boats through heavy whitewater. He was always writing fiction.

His first book was a how-to text on fly-fishing, The Complete Steelheader (Stackpole 2008). He went on to publish two fishing related novels Northwest of Normal (Barclay Creek 2009) and Holding Lies (Skyhorse 2011); in late 2009, he began work on the novel that would become Whiskey When We’re Dry (Viking 2018).

Larison lives with his family in Oregon’s Coast Range mountains, where he is at work on his next novel.
 

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

Grass Roots Books & Music
227 SW 2nd. St, Corvallis
 

Afternoon Sky, Harney Desert is Ann’s 3rd collection of poems. It is also the title of a famous painting owned by the Portland Art Museum. This collection has four sections: Dreams, Prayers, The Past, The Here & Now. Ann is glad to still be in “the here and now.” Ann sees herself as a truth-teller, realizing however that even a memory is one more invention of the truth, altered every time it is recalled. This collection includes elegies about research and pain, the weather (mostly rain), and conversations with family members that never occurred. Her poems are transportive, poignant, and deeply honest.
 

The Shape of the Wind  by Roger Weaver is a collection of fifty-seven poems that encompasses architecture, constancy of the heart’s affection, love--both passionate and tender--and the memories of childhood. They take place in gardens, favorite homes, countries, and capitals that correspond to the development from boy to man. These poems break with the past, the unplanned illnesses, and all the loves of a full life like the constancy of the breath of the wind.

 

Ann Staley grew up on the East Coast in Harrisburg Pennsylvania. After college and a two year stint in Peace Corps/Brazil she realized she’d never been west of Ohio. This began her 10K mile journey across the United States. She picked up every hitchhiker and took them wherever they were going. After visiting with a house full of former Peace Corps friends in San Francisco, and because her VW bug didn’t float, she drove north to Oregon where she had the names of two
MSW social workers who’d “dropped out” and “gone back to the land.” She stayed with them for a year and then missed her role as being a teacher. She joined the teaching staff at Hedrick Middle School. She taught in five Oregon School Districts and spent twenty years with the Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis & Clark College.

Roger Weaver, a native Oregonian, has 5 books with Press 22, Gardy Loo Press and Forest Gypsy Press and over 70 poems in The North American Review, The Dog River Review and Hubbub. His poems are set to music and presented in choral concerts. He led poetry workshops as an OSU professor and throughout the Northwest.

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

Corvallis-Benton Library Main Meeting Room

645 NW Monroe Ave, Corvallis, OR 97330

 

Bob Welch, author, speaker, and award-winning columnist shares the amazing story of Dick Fosbury, a failed high school athlete who invents a new, backward-over-the-bar style and, five years later, is the best high-jumper on the planet. The OSU grad is notable not only for his athletic accomplishments, but for his stance to support a black OSU football player who'd been kicked off the team. And, after flunking out of school and almost being drafted while the war in Vietnam raged, Fosbury returned to OSU and earned his civil engineering degree. Many know the basic Fosbury story; few knew all that he overcame — the death of a sibling, a near-drowning, doubt, ridicule and doctors who said his style would lead to mass spine injuries — to win the gold medal. But Fosbury laughed last. Every high jumper in the world today uses his style.

 

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

Corvallis-Benton Library Main Meeting Room

645 NW Monroe Ave, Corvallis, OR 97330
 

Join us for local picture book illustrator Katherine Roy’s presentation on her latest book, Otis and Will Discover the Deep, by acclaimed author Barb Rosenstock. Roy will take us behind the scenes of her entire bookmaking process from research to the final art, discussing the history of ocean exploration and the deep-sea science she learned along the way. Book signing and drawing activity to follow.

 

Katherine Roy is the award-winning author and illustrator of Neighborhood Sharks: Hunting with the Great Whites of California's Farallon Islands and How to Be an Elephant: Growing Up in the African Wild. She is also the illustrator for the Expeditioners series by S. S. Taylor and of Buried Beneath Us by Anthony Aveni. She loves science, history, and big adventures, and is endlessly fascinated by the way things live. A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, she currently lives with her husband and young son in Oregon, where she's still learning how to be a human.
 

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

Grass Roots Books & Music
227 SW 2nd. St, Corvallis
 

You Never Know celebrates the presence of Mystery and Longing in memories and everyday life. It is an elegant testimony to the joy of making sense of everyday moments with a mix of wonder, admiration, curiosity, and awe. Chris Anderson’s richly imagined poems juxtapose that which is near and far, current and past, within and without, desired and denied.

Corvallis poet, Catholic deacon, and English Professor at Oregon State University, Chris Anderson has written over a dozen books of poetry and nonfiction that share his unique wisdom and contemplations. He’s received awards as a professor at OSU and for his nonfiction works. For more information on Chris Anderson, please click here.
 

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

 

Grass Roots Books & Music
227 SW 2nd. St, Corvallis

As a novice horsewoman, Nancy Pfeiffer took off across Patagonia alone on horseback. Over the next two decades and three thousand kilometers of rugged horse trail, the hospitable people who live there take her in, sharing their culture and homes. Nancy witnessed the subtle yet disturbing changes of a rich, self-sufficient culture. When a scheme to dam Patagonia’s largest rivers threatened the land and lifestyle Nancy had come to love, she joined the Cabalgata Sin Represas, a 330-kilometer non-violent protest ride against the dams, and her story became history – on horseback.

Life as a mountaineering guide has given Nancy Pfeiffer the opportunity to experience the world’s highest summits, yet it is the landscapes and cultures encountered along the way that intrigue her most.Her published works range from poetry to scientific research, and explore subjects from the joys and frustrations of building a house as a single woman to mountaineering for paraplegics. Nancy now lives with her husband Fredrik in a cabin outside Palmer, Alaska.
 

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

 

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

 

Nick Dybek is a recipient of a Granta New Voices selection, a Michener-Copernicus Society of America Award, and a Maytag Fellowship. He received a BA from the University of Michigan and an MFA from The Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He teaches at Oregon State University. He is the author of When Captain Flint Was Still a Good Man and the most recent release, The Verdun Affair.

In 1921, two young Americans meet in Verdun, the city in France where one of the most devastating battles of the war was waged. Tom is an orphan from Chicago, a former ambulance driver now gathering bones from the battlefield; Sarah is an expatriate from Boston searching for the husband who wandered off from his division and hasn't been seen since. Quickly, the two fall into a complicated affair against the ghostly backdrop of the ruined city. Months later, Sarah and Tom meet again at the psychiatric ward of an Italian hospital, drawn there by the appearance of a mysterious patient the doctors call Douglas Fairbanks (after the silent film actor)--a shell-shocked soldier with no memory of who he is. At the hospital, Tom and Sarah are joined by Paul, an Austrian journalist with his own interest in the amnesiac.

From the bone-strewn fields of Verdun to the bombed-out cafés of Paris, from the riot-torn streets of Bologna to the riotous parties of 1950s Hollywood, The Verdun Affair is a riveting tale of romance, grief, and the far-reaching consequences of a single lie.

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

The Corvallis Arts Center
700 SW Madison Ave, Corvallis
 

To research books, films and articles, Sy Montgomery has been chased by an angry silverback gorilla in Zaire and bitten by a vampire bat in Costa Rica, worked in a pit crawling with 18,000 snakes in Manitoba and handled a wild tarantula in French Guiana. She has been deftly undressed by an orangutan in Borneo, hunted by a tiger in India, and swum with piranhas, electric eels and dolphins in the Amazon. She has searched the Altai Mountains of Mongolia’s Gobi for snow leopards, hiked into the trackless cloud forest of Papua New Guinea to radiocollar tree kangaroos, and learned to SCUBA dive in order to commune with octopuses.

Sy’s 20 books for both adults and children have garnered many honors. The Soul of an Octopus was a 2015 Finalist for the National Book Awards. The Good Good Pig, her memoir of life with her pig, Christopher Hogwood, is an international bestseller. She is the winner of the 2009 New England Independent Booksellers Association Nonfiction Award, the 2010 Children’s Book Guild Nonfiction Award, the Henry Bergh Award for Nonfiction (given by the ASPCA for Humane Education) and dozens of other honors. Her work with the man-eating tigers, the subject of her book Spell Of The Tiger, was made into in a National Geographic television documentary she scripted and narrated. Also for National Geographic TV she developed and scripted Mother Bear Man, about her friend, Ben Kilham, who raises and releases orphaned bear cubs, which won a Chris award.

Sy writes for adults and children, for print and broadcast, in America and overseas in an effort to reach as wide an audience as possible at what she considers a critical turning point in human history. “We are on the cusp of either destroying this sweet, green Earth—or revolutionizing the way we understand the rest of animate creation,” she says. “It’s an important time to be writing about the connections we share with our fellow creatures. It’s a great time to be alive.” She speaks frequently at schools and museums, libraries and universities.

Grass Roots will have books available for this event.

The Majestic Theatre
115 SW 2nd St, Corvallis

Esther is Komemma Kalapuya and is an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz. She is a life-long storyteller for the Kalapuya and is the chair to a non-profit Kalapuya organization, Komemma Cultural Protection Association, dedicated to researching the Kalapuya, particularly their stories, songs and dances. She is also a storyteller for the Wisdom of the Elders. http://www.wisdomoftheelders.org/about/

Doors open at 6:00pm

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

Corvallis-Benton Library Main Meeting Room

645 NW Monroe Ave, Corvallis, OR 97330

In Magdalena's Mountain, Robert Michael Pyle's first and long-awaited novel, the award-winning naturalist proves he is as at home in an imagined landscape as he is a natural one. At the center of this story of majesty and high mountain magic are three Magdalenas--Mary, a woman whose uncertain journey opens the book; the Magdalena Mountain, shrouded in mystery and menace; and the all black Magdalena Alpine butterfly, the most elusive of several rare and beautiful species found on the mountain.

ROBERT MICHAEL PYLE grew up and learned his butterflies in Colorado, where he fell in love with the Magdalena Alpine and its high-country habitat. He took his PhD in butterfly ecology at Yale University, worked as a conservation biologist in Papua New Guinea, Oregon, and Cambridge, and has written full-time for many years. His twenty-two books include Wintergreen (John Burroughs Medal), Where Bigfoot Walks (Guggenheim Fellowship), and Sky Time in Gray's River (National Outdoor Book Award). He lives in rural Southwest Washington State, and still studies butterflies.

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

OSU Memorial Union Ballroom
2501 SW Jefferson Way, Corvallis
 

This book talk will address food equity and is inspired by the aphorism that it’s better to “build a longer table, not a higher fence.” Julia will talk about her work as a practical and proactive response to the blatant gender and racial discrimination that plagues the food industry and share her cookbooks and writing about the role of food in activism and social change.

 

Julia Turshen mixes advice, encouraging tales, and a hint of activism in her easy-to-read, easy-to-follow cookbooks that are geared towards anyone who loves food, but is hesitant in the kitchen. Her newest release Now & Again comes to life with Julia's funny and encouraging voice and is brimming with good stuff, including can't-get-enough-of-it recipes, inspiring menus for social gatherings, helpful timelines for flawlessly throwing a party, oh-so-helpful "It's Me Again" recipes, which show how to use leftovers in new and delicious ways, and the tips on how to be smart and thrifty with your food choices. Now & Again will change the way we gather, eat, and think about leftovers, and, like the name suggests, you'll find yourself reaching for its pages time and time again.
 

Julia Turshen is the bestselling author of Feed the Resistance, named the Best Cookbook of 2017 by Eater, and Small Victories, named one of the Best Cookbooks of 2016 by the New York Times and NPR. Her latest book, Now & Again, will be out in September, 2018. She has co authored numerous cookbooks and hosted the first two seasons of Radio Cherry Bombe. She has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Vogue, Bon Appétit, Food & Wine, and Saveur. Epicurious has called her one of the ‘100 Greatest Home Cooks of All Time’ and she sits on the Advisory Board of the National Museum of American History’s Kitchen Cabinet. She is the founder of Equity At The Table (EATT), an inclusive digital directory of women and non-binary individuals in food. Julia lives in the Hudson Valley with her wife and pets.

 

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

Grass Roots Books & Music
227 SW 2nd. St, Corvallis

Set in Seattle, Steve Toutonghi’s second novel, Side Life, is a dazzling, intriguing, and philosophical blend of literary science fiction. Vin, a down-on-his-luck young tech entrepreneur forced out of the software company he started, takes a job house-sitting an ultra-modern Seattle mansion whose owner has gone missing. There he discovers a secret basement lab with an array of computers and three large, smooth caskets. Inside one he finds a woman in a state of suspended animation. There is also a dog-eared notebook filled with circuit diagrams, beautiful and intricate drawings of body parts, and pages of code. When Vin decides to enter one of the caskets himself, his reality begins to unravel, and he finds himself on a terrifying journey that raises fundamental questions about reality, free will, and the meaning of a human life.
A native of Seattle, Steve Toutonghi studied fiction and poetry while completing a BA in Anthropology at Stanford. After various professional forays, he began a career in technology that led him from Silicon Valley back to Seattle. He is the author of a previous novel, Join.

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

Whiteside Theatre

361 SW Madison Ave. Corvallis

 

The Mid-Willamette Valley's premier literary event, with readings by Oregon authors and autographed books for sale! Wine, beer, and cider available for purchase, with proceeds going to benefit Linn Benton Food Share. Tickets are on sale for $12 online or $15 at the door. This event is sponsored by The OSU Center for the Humanities.

 

Grass Roots will be selling books by the readers at this event and will donate 100% of the net proceeds after costs to Linn Benton Food Share on behalf of The Magic Barrel.

Doors open at 6:00pm.

Grass Roots Books & Music
227 SW 2nd. St, Corvallis

In the mid-1990s, facing severe cuts to its public funding, the University of Oregon—like so many colleges across the country—was desperate for cash. Luckily, the Oregon Ducks’ 1995 Rose Bowl berth caught the attention of the school’s wealthiest alumnus: Nike founder Phil Knight, who was seeking new marketing angles at the collegiate level. And so the University of Nike was born: Knight has so far donated more than half a billion dollars to the school in exchange for high-visibility branding opportunities. But as journalist Joshua Hunt shows in University of Nike, Oregon has paid dearly for the veneer of financial prosperity and athletic success that has come with this brand partnering. University of Nike is the dramatic exposé of how the University of Oregon sold its soul to Nike, and what that means for the future of our public institutions and our society.

Joshua Hunt is a former foreign correspondent for Reuters in Tokyo. His work has also appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, the California Sunday Magazine, and the Atavist Magazine. He is a graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where he was a fellow at the Toni Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism and a recipient of the Lynton Fellowship in Book Writing.

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

Grass Roots Books & Music
227 SW 2nd. St, Corvallis

In this visually stunning book, award-winning journalists Betsy Mason and Greg Miller--authors of the National Geographic cartography blog "All Over the Map"--explore the intriguing stories behind maps from a wide variety of cultures, civilizations, and time periods. Based on interviews with scores of leading cartographers, curators, historians, and scholars, this is a remarkable selection of fascinating and unusual maps.

This diverse compendium includes ancient maps of dragon-filled seas, elaborate graphics picturing unseen concepts and forces from inside Earth to outer space, devious maps created by spies, and maps from pop culture such as the schematics to the Death Star and a map of Westeros from Game of Thrones. If your brain craves maps--and Mason and Miller would say it does, whether you know it or not--this eye-opening visual feast will inspire and delight.

Greg Miller is a science and technology journalist with a lifelong fascination with maps. Together with Betsy Mason, he writes National Geographic's cartography blog, All Over the Map. Greg has been a staff writer at Wired and Science magazines, and he writes about neuroscience and other topics in addition to cartography. Before becoming a journalist, Greg earned a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Stanford University and completed the science writing program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

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

Valley Library Rotunda
201 SW Waldo Pl, Corvallis
 

Through a dazzling combination of memoir, history, reporting, visual culture, literature, and theology, Sarah Sentilles offers an impassioned defense of life lived by peace and principle. It is a literary collage with an urgent hope at its core: that art might offer tools for remaking the world. In Draw Your Weapons, Sentilles tells the true stories of Howard, a conscientious objector during World War II, and Miles, a former prison guard at Abu Ghraib, and in the process she challenges conventional thinking about how war is waged, witnessed, and resisted. The pacifist and the soldier both create art in response to war: Howard builds a violin; Miles paints portraits of detainees. With echoes of Susan Sontag and Maggie Nelson, Sentilles investigates images of violence from the era of slavery to the drone age. In doing so, she wrestles with some of our most profound questions: What does it take to inspire compassion? What impact can one person have? How should we respond to violence when it feels like it can't be stopped?

 

Sarah Sentilles is a writer, teacher, critical theorist, scholar of religion, and author of many books, including Breaking Up with God: A Love Story. Her most recent book, Draw Your Weapons, was published by Random House in 2017. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Oprah Magazine, Ms., Religion Dispatches, Oregon Arts Watch, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications. She earned a bachelor's degree at Yale and master's and doctoral degrees at Harvard. She is the co-founder of the Immigration Alliance of Idaho. At the core of her scholarship, writing, and activism is a commitment to investigating the roles language, images, and practices play in oppression, violence, social transformation, and justice movements. She has taught at Pacific Northwest College of Art, Portland State University, California State University Channel Islands, and Willamette University, where she was the Mark and Melody Teppola Presidential Distinguished Visiting Professor.

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

Grass Roots Books & Music
227 SW 2nd. St, Corvallis
 

In BORN, horses sprout from seeds and fawns fall out of the sky. And a whole day may pass where all we do is take turns holding brightly-colored babies swaddled in white towels. But inside that day is the quiet reminder that not all our children survive. Though sometimes as a minotaur and sometimes as a tree, the speaker in these poems moves through surreal plots and landscapes which, when read together, create a touching and singular story of childhood and parenthood, and of transformation through loss.
 

Chatbook 1 is a book of poetry, written by a young man who would love to spend his time thinking over a cup of coffee or listening to squirrels talk in the woods, but fortunately gets distracted by all the other wonderful things there are to do. Here, he invites you into his reflections on what it means to love yourself and love others, how the ways we construct our stories inform who we are, and sometimes, what it would be like to be an earthworm. In it, the artists hopes you find whimsy, food for thought, something to tug on your heartstrings, but most of all, hope - hope that, on this planet that seems to amplify news of its own unkindness, we might make it a little kinder by sharing ourselves authentically.
 

Jon Boisvert was born in Elkhorn, Wisconsin, and now lives in Oregon. He studied poetry at Oregon State University and the Independent Publishing Resource Center in Portland. You can sometimes see new writing and art at www.jonboisvert.com. BORN is his first book.

Christopher Mikkelson is a spoken word poet in the Willamette Valley of Oregon. His work explores, among other things, the intricacies of identity and the value of vulnerability. He frequents the Eugene Poetry Slam, the Corvallis Open Mic scene, and has a special place in his heart for the poetry club at Linn-Benton Community College, where he was involved as the student Poet Laureate from 2016-2017.

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

Native American Longhouse 
311 SW 26th St, Corvallis

The poems in This American Ghost address the complicated and often invisible consequences of our American expansion—the violence and history of the indigenous body as an inheritor of trauma. Whether in the grief and lingering aftermath of a loved one’s suicide, counting the pulse of the chaotic viscera when entering indigenous myth, or re-witnessing the state-sanctioned loss and tearing of a body’s mother tongue, these poems stand waiting at the border between survival and what’s been erased—these ghosts left breathing and still longing for any bloom inside the wreckage of our American conquest. Throughout this short collection, words and phrases are braided with English and nimipuutímt, images of surrealism enter desperate realities, underscoring how language—which begins in the body as it listens to the immediate world—is the only fabric we have to dress and ultimately give shape to our wounds.

Michael Wasson is the author of This American Ghost (YesYes Books, 2017), which won the 2016 Vinyl 45 Chapbook Prize, and the special French/English edition Self-Portrait with Smeared Centuries (Éditions des Lisierès, 2018). In 2017, he was selected to co-edit for the Bettering American Poetry anthology series, and he currently serves as the associate editor for Winter Tangerine. A 2018 Native Arts & Cultures Foundation National Artist Fellow in Literature, finalist for a 2018 Ruth Lilly/Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and winner of the 2017 Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry, his poems appear in American Poets, Beloit Poetry Journal, Kenyon Review, Narrative, New England Review, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, and Best New Poets 2017. A graduate of Oregon State University’s MFA Program in 2014 and recent teacher in the Koshiki Islands of southwestern Japan, he is nimíipuu from the Nez Perce Reservation in Idaho.
Photo by Junshi Yonekura.

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

Grass Roots Books & Music
227 SW 2nd. St, Corvallis
 

Outside of Texas and literary circles, the author Billy Lee Brammer (1929-1978) may not evoke the cult recognition shared by his contemporaries and peers. He published one of the greatest political novels, The Gay Place, which depicted an Austin, Texas that no longer exists. In Leaving the Gay  Place: Billy Lee Brammer and the Great Society Tracy Daugherty showcases Brammer’s status, acquaintance with Lyndon B. Johnson--the Texas Senator during the 1950’s, and ultimately his self-indulgence and self-destruction. “Brammer’s arch storytelling style seemed unique," writes Daugherty, "because other writers had not yet exploited Texas's rich hypocrisies—the bad behavior of its politicians and religious leaders.” Brammer’s increasing drug dependency, which overtook any further writing ambitions, served to firmly position him within the center of the evolving 1960s counterculture movement, as he explored various underground venues and new drugs. An engrossing, well-documented biography of a largely forgotten writer and his place within a quickly changing period of the 20th century.

 

Tracy Daugherty has written biographies of Joan Didion, Joseph Heller, and Donald Barthelme, as well as four novels, six short story collections, a book of personal essays, and a collection of essays on literature and writing. His stories and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, the Paris Review online, McSweeney's, Boulevard, Chelsea, the Georgia Review, Triquarterly, the Southern Review, and many other journals. Daugherty has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, Bread Loaf, Artsmith, and the Vermont Studio Center. A member of PEN and the Texas Institute of Letters, he is a five-time winner of the Oregon Book Award. At Oregon State University, Daugherty helped found the Masters of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing and is now Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing, Emeritus.

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

First United Methodist Church
1165 NW Monroe Ave, Corvallis

In his early twenties, Clem Starck dropped out of Princeton and decided to take responsibility for his own education--to read deeply, travel widely, and write poems with the precision and plainspoken-ness of the Chinese masters. Over the decades, he also kept his mind clear by making a living with his hands. Cathedrals & Parking Lots represents the work of a lifetime--poems of memorable clarity and substance based on actual experiences, whether standing looking out on the bow of a freighter, dismantling houses for a living, building a freeway overpass, or travelling to Russia and studying the language. Composed in the cadences of everyday speech, Starck’s poems have the functional beauty of a Shaker chair--every word, every line, every image belongs.
 

Clem Starck was born in 1937. A Princeton dropout and former merchant seaman, he has supported his literary and intellectual interests for more than fifty years by working with his hands, mainly as a carpenter and construction foreman. He is the author of six books of poetry and has performed his poems widely throughout the west. A widower, he has three grown children and lives on forty-some acres in the foothills of the Coast Range in western Oregon.

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