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.

Grass Roots Books
227 SW 2nd Street

As the oldest of nine siblings, Ann Marie Etheridge felt compelled from her first years to take on a parenting role in a household battered by poverty and later, alcoholism. Long Way Home is the remarkable story of a young person learning to trust herself and take control, a journey of self-discovery by turns amusing and frightening.
Set against the backdrop of the turbulent 1960’s, Ann Marie’s odyssey took her from the Projects of Camden, New Jersey, to the palm-lined streets of Hayward, California...from the blind faith of childhood to the nuanced world of adulthood...from the role of victim to the defender of victims. Ann Marie’s triumph over adversity led her to a successful career in counseling, her own struggle allowing her to better understand those of others. A compelling true story that fills the heart with hope.

Ann Marie Etheridge was born in Salem, New Jersey.  She earned a Master of Science degree in Counseling Psychology from California State University, Hayward, and spent her professional career as a counselor at Linn-Benton Community College in Albany, Oregon, where she took special pride in helping folks who came from “the other side of the tracks”, as she had.  Ann Marie is retired and living in Corvallis, Oregon, where she writes memoir and assists other writers in a local critique group. Ann Marie has published professionally in the American Psychologist Journal. Long Way Home is her debut book, and she lives in Corvallis.

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

Grass Roots Books
227 SW 2nd Street

In the late ’90s and early 2000s, the Portland Trail Blazers were one of the hottest teams in the NBA. For almost a decade, they won 60 percent of their games while making it to the Western Conference Finals twice. However, what happened off-court was just as unforgettable as what they did on the court. When someone asked Blazers general manager Bob Whitsitt about his team’s chemistry, he replied that he’d “never studied chemistry in college.” And with that, the “Jail Blazers” were born. Built in a similar fashion to a fantasy team, the team had skills, but their issues ended up being their undoing. Many consider it the darkest period in franchise history. While fans across the country were watching the skills of  the players, those in Portland couldn’t have been more disappointed in the players’ off-court actions. This, many have mentioned, included a very racial element—which carried over to the players as well. As forward Rasheed Wallace said, “We’re not really going to worry about what the hell [the fans] think about us. They really don’t matter to us. They can boo us every day, but they’re still going to ask for our autographs if they see us on the street. That’s why they’re fans and we’re NBA players.” While people think of the Detroit Pistons of the eighties as the elite “Bad Boys,” the “Jail Blazers” were actually bad. Author Kerry Eggers, who covered the Trail Blazers during this controversial era, goes back to share the stories from the players, coaches, management, and those in Portland when the players were in the headlines as much for their play as for their legal issues.

Kerry Eggers is a Corvallis High and Oregon State graduate. Eggers began his career as a sportswriter at The Oregon Journal in 1975 before The Journal merged with The Oregonian. Eggers worked there until 2000 before moving over to the Portland Tribune, where he has worked since then as sports columnist. Through his career, Eggers has covered a variety of major events, including two Summer Olympic Games, four Super Bowls, a World Series, two major-league All-Star games, a Pro Bowl, a BCS Championship game, four College World Series and many NBA Finals and All-Star games. Eggers is a six-time Oregon Sportswriter of the Year winner. He has written seven books including his newest title Jail Blazers: How the Portland Trail Blazers Became the Bad Boys of Basketball.

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.

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

The Stone Award for Lifetime Literary Achievement, created by a generous gift from Vicki and Patrick Stone '74, honors a major American author who has created a body of critically acclaimed literary work and has been - in the tradition of creative writing at OSU - a dedicated mentor to succeeding generations of young writers. The 2019 winner is Pullitzer Prize winning author, Colson Whitehead.

Colson Whitehead is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Underground Railroad (an Oprah’s Book Club selection and winner of the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize), The Noble Hustle, Zone One, Sag Harbor, The Intuitionist, John Henry Days, Apex Hides the Hurt, and one collection of essays, The Colossus of New York.

Colson Whitehead’s reviews, essays, and fiction have appeared in a number of publications, such as the New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Harper’s and Granta.
He has received a MacArthur Fellowship, A Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, the Dos Passos Prize, a fellowship at the Cullman Center for Scholars and W+riters, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for John Henry Days.He has taught at the University of Houston, Columbia University, Brooklyn College, Hunter College, New York University, Princeton University, Wesleyan University, and been a Writer-in-Residence at Vassar College, the University of Richmond, and the University of Wyoming. He lives in New York City.

The biennial Stone Award is one of the largest prizes of its kind given by an American university. Past recipients include Joyce Carol Oates, Tobias Wolff and Rita Dove.

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

Grass Roots Books
227 SW 2nd Street
 

Join Sophia Shalmiyev, and Liz Scott for “The Art of Memoirs and Family” as they share their journey, processes, and unique experiences writing and publishing riveting memoirs, with author, Margaret Malone facilitating the evening’s discussion. Sophia Shalmiyev and Liz Scott both use different methods of haunting vignettes, photographic investigations, and letters to express their stories and challenge the questions left unanswered.

 

Born to a Russian mother and an Azerbaijani father, Shalmiyev was raised in 1980s Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). An imbalance of power and the prevalence of antisemitism in her homeland led her father to steal Shalmiyev away, emigrating to America, abandoning her estranged mother, Elena. Now a mother herself, in Mother Winter Shalmiyev depicts in urgent vignettes her emotional journeys as an immigrant, an artist, and a woman raised without her mother. An MFA graduate of Portland State University, Sophia was the nonfiction editor for The Portland Review and is a recipient of the Laurel’s scholarship and numerous Kellogg’s fellowship awards. She has a second master’s degree in Creative Arts Therapy from The School of Visual Arts, where she worked with survivors of domestic violence and human trafficking. Her work has appeared in numerous journals; all of them with a feminist lens. She lives in Portland.

 

Like an archaeological dig, Liz Scott's memoir, This Never Happened, goes in search of the answers to the mysteries of her family. In her quest to uncover the truth, she mines photographs and letters, leaving no one, including herself, unexamined. This is a spare work, alternately heartbreaking and darkly comic. In the end, it's about the struggle to clear away pain to make room for compassion and the challenge of making peace with questions that will never be answered. Liz Scott has been a practicing psychologist for 40 years, helping clients to identify life themes and make sense of the puzzle in their lives. She has brought this focus to her writing in the last fifteen years, first as a short story writer and most recently in her memoir, This Never Happened. She has been published in numerous literary journals and served two terms on the board of Oregon Literary Arts. Originally from New York City, she currently lives and works in Portland, Oregon.

Margaret Malone is the author of the story collection People Like You, Finalist for the 2016 PEN/Hemingway Award and Winner of the Balcones Fiction Prize. A co-host of the artist and literary gathering SHARE, Margaret lives in Portland, Oregon, and is the perfect author to facilitate for the event.
 

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 Long Honduran Night is the story of resistance, repression, and US involvement in Honduras after the violent military coup that deposed President Manuel Zelaya in 2009. This powerful narrative layers first person experiences and political analysis in two perspectives: the Honduran politics including two repressive regimes that followed the coup, and the evolution of Honduran resistance as well as a new solidarity movement in the United States. This narrative directly counters the mainstream media coverage that portrays Honduras as a violent, unrelenting power and instead focuses on the sobering challenges and inspiring collective strength with which people face them.

 

Dana Frank is a Professor of History Emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Baneras: Women Transforming the Banana Unions of Latin America. Since the 2009 military coup, Dana’s articles about human rights and U.S. policy in Honduras have appeared in The Nation, New York Times, Politico Magazine, Foreign Affairs.com, The Baffler, Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, and many other publications, and she has testified in both the US Congress and Canadian Parliament.

This event will be co-sponsored by the Corvallis Latin America Solidarity Committee.

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

Grass Roots Books
227 SW 2nd Street

Wendell Newman, a young ranch hand in Montana, has recently lost his mother, leaving him an orphan, as his father met a violent end more than a decade earlier. His bank account holds less than a hundred dollars, and he owes back taxes on what remains of the land his parents owned, as well as money for the surgeries that failed to save his mother’s life. Into this situation comes seven-year-old Rowdy Burns, the illegitimate son of Wendell’s cousin, who is incarcerated after falling prey to addiction. Traumatized, Rowdy is mute and damaged. Caring for him will be a test of Wendell’s will and resolve, and yet he comes to love the boy more than he ever thought possible. That love will be stretched to the breaking point during the first legal wolf hunt in Montana in more than thirty years, when a murder results in a manhunt, and Wendell finds himself on the wrong side of a disaffected fringe group, hoping both to protect Rowdy and to avoid the same violent fate that claimed his father. This dark and haunting debut novel is an unforgettable tale of sacrificial love, with two characters who win the reader’s heart from the first page to the last.

Joe Wilkins grew up in eastern Montana, where he spent his summers working on a wheat and cattle ranch deep in the Bull Mountains. He is the author of a memoir, The Mountain and the Father, winner of a 2014 GLCA New Writers Award—an honor that has previously recognized early work by the likes of Richard Ford, Louise Erdrich, and Alice Munro—and three collections of poetry, including, When We Were Birds, winner of the 2017 Oregon Book Award in Poetry. Fall Back Down When I Die is his first novel. He lives with his family in western Oregon, where he directs the creative writing program at Linfield College.

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
 

George Estreich’s publications include a chapbook, Elegy for Dan Rabinowitz (Intertext, 1993) and a full-length poetry collection, Textbook Illustrations of the Human Body, which won the Gorsline Prize from Cloudbank Books (2003). The Shape of the Eye (SMU Press, 2011; Penguin, 2013), his memoir about raising a daughter with Down syndrome, received the 2012 Oregon Book Award in Creative Nonfiction.Estreich has published essays and articles in The New York Times, The Oregonian, Avidly, The American Medical Association Journal of Ethics, Salon, Tin House, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.

His new book, Fables and Futures: Biotechnology, Disability, and the Stories we Tell Ourselves (MIT Press), explores the way we think and talk about human-directed biotechnology, from next-generation prenatal tests to CRISPR/Cas9, the genome-editing tool. Blending personal narrative and scholarship, Estreich argues that with biotech able to select and shape who we are, we need to imagine what it means to belong.

Erica Trabold is the author of Five Plots (Seneca Review Books, 2018), selected by John D'Agata as the inaugural winner of the Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize. Five Plots delves into notions of how we are shaped by the land every bit as much as we shape it, eschewing easy ways of understanding and experiencing the world by investigating place as a malleable psychological and phenomenological force. "This is a pinprick of a book with a very generous heart," writes D'Agata.

Trabold's lyric essays appear in The Rumpus, Passages North, The Collagist, South Dakota Review, Seneca Review, Essay Daily, and elsewhere. A graduate of Oregon State University’s MFA program and the University of Nebraska at Omaha, Erica writes and teaches in Portland, Oregon. 

Grass Roots Books
227 SW 2nd Street
 

Metaphysics and social critiques clash and blend in John Sibley Williams As One Fire Consumes Another and A. Molotkov’s Synonyms for Silence. As One Fire Consumes Another transcends beyond the boundaries of family, history, country, and beyond the body’s tragedies. It is a collection of surrealist visions and social insights that meet, wrestle, and revitalize with each other in a way that challenges, changes, and impacts readers.

Synonyms for Silence, traverses a terrain of terror and wonder. These sharp, brief lyrics and prose poems subject the world to ethical and metaphysical scrutiny, examining the familiar as well as the unknowable aspects of human existence and contrasting our transient chemical reality with our ability to manifest meaning. Through his use of potent, sometimes perplexing metaphors and vivid, often surreal imagery, Molotkov places readers in the moment of choice, of truth, of suffering, and honors it with tenderness and care, offering solace through shared humanity.
 

John Sibley Williams is the author of As One Fire Consumes Another,  Disinheritance, and Controlled Hallucinations. He has also served as editor of two Northwest poetry anthologies, Alive at the Center and Motionless from the Iron Bridge. A nineteen-time Pushcart nominee, John is the winner of numerous awards, including the Laux/Millar Prize, Philip Booth Award, American Literary Review Poetry Contest, Phyllis Smart-Young Prize, The 46er Prize, Nancy D. Hargrove Editors' Prize, Confrontation Poetry Prize, and Vallum Award for Poetry. He serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review and works as a teacher and literary agent. John holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Rivier University and an MA in Book Publishing from Portland State University. He teaches literary arts at A Renaissance School of Art and Science and Book Publishing at Portland Community College. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his partner, twin toddlers, and a voracious Boston Terrier.
 

Anatoly Molotkov was born in Russia, moved to the US in 1990 and switched to writing in English in 1993. His poetry collections are The Catalog of Broken Things, Application of Shadows and Synonyms for Silence. Published by Kenyon, Iowa, Antioch, Massachusetts, Atlanta, Bennington and Tampa Reviews, Pif, Volt, 2 River View and many more, Molotkov is winner of various fiction and poetry contests and an Oregon Literary Fellowship. His translation of a Chekhov story was included by Knopf in their Everyman Series. He co-edits The Inflectionist Review.

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

OSU Milam Auditorium
2520 SW Campus Way, Corvallis

Christopher Browning, an emeritus professor of history at the University of North Carolina and previously a member of the History Department at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, ranks among the most honored and respected of all Holocaust historians. He has authored more than a dozen books on the Holocaust, and several are classics. Widely known and admired for Ordinary Men, his study of an SS police battalion that was responsible for the killing or deportation of about 70,000 Polish Jews during 1942-43, he has also written extensively on the evolution of the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews of Europe, his book, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939-March 1942 being perhaps the best known and most cited studies of this crucial issue.

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
 

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

 

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.

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

Grass Roots Books
227 SW 2nd Street

In Ungovernable, Therese invites readers to “set yourselves free from the agonizing pressures of twenty-first-century parenting” and take a trip back in time to learn about the backwards, pseudoscientific, and downright bizarre childrearing fashions of the nineteenth century. Sourced from actual advice books of the era (mostly written by men) and over 170 photographs, Ungovernable advises on how to be sure you’re not too ugly, sickly, or stupid to breed; which positions and room decor will help you conceive a son; how much beer, wine, cyanide, and heroin to consume while pregnant; which foods won’t turn your children into sexual deviants; how to choose the best birching cane--and so much more! This book will make readers laugh, grimace, and be very thankful for modern childcare.

Therese Oneill is the New York Times bestselling author of Unmentionable: The Victorian Lady's Guide to Sex, Marriage and Manners. She can be found online at www.writerthereseoneill.com.

Valley Library Rotunda
201 SW Waldo Pl, Corvallis

Melissa Febos is the author of the memoir, Whip Smart, and the essay collection, Abandon Me, which The New Yorker called, “mesmerizing.” Abandon Me was a LAMBDA Literary Award finalist, a Publishing Triangle Award finalist, an Indie Next Pick, and widely named a Best Book of 2017. Febos is the inaugural winner of the Jean Córdova Nonfiction Award from LAMBDA Literary and the recipient of the 2017 Sarah Verdone Writing Award from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Her work has recently appeared in Tin House, Granta, The Believer, The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, Lenny Letter, The Guardian, and Vogue. Her essays have been anthologized widely, winning prizes from Prairie Schooner, Story Quarterly, and The Center for Women Writers at Salem College. She is a three-time MacDowell Colony fellow and has also received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, The Barbara Deming Memorial Foundation, The BAU Institute, Ragdale, and The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. She is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Monmouth University and serves on the Board of Directors for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts.

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