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Near Flesh: A Celebration of Katherine Dunn

Tue, October 7 from 6:30 pm - 7:30 pm PDT
716 SE Grand Ave Portland, OR 97214

Join us in welcoming Omar El Akkad, Jeff VanderMeer, and Crystal Willer for a conversation on the work of Katherine Dunn, celebrating the posthumous release of her short story collection Near Flesh.

Omar El Akkad

Omar El Akkad

Omar El Akkad is an author and journalist. He was born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar, moved to Canada as a teenager and now lives in the United States. The start of his journalism career coincided with the start of the war on terror, and over the following decade he reported from Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay and many other locations around the world. His work earned a National Newspaper Award for Investigative Journalism and the Goff Penny Award for young journalists. His fiction and non-fiction writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, Guernica, GQ and many other newspapers and magazines. His debut novel, American War, is an international bestseller and has been translated into thirteen languages. It won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award, the Oregon Book Award for fiction, the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize and has been nominated for more than ten other awards. It was listed as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, Washington Post, GQ, NPR, Esquire and was selected by the BBC as one of 100 novels that changed our world. His second novel, What Strange Paradise, won the Giller Prize, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award, the Oregon Book Award for fiction, and was shortlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize. It was also named a best book of the year by the New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR and several other publications. His most recent book is his first book of nonfiction, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. Omar lives near Portland, Oregon, where he is on the faculty of the Pacific University MFA in Writing program.

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Jeff VanderMeer

Jeff VanderMeer

Jeff VanderMeer is the New York Times bestselling author of Hummingbird Salamander, the Borne novels, the Southern Reach series, the Ambergris trilogy, and Veniss Underground. He writes widely about issues relating to climate change and the environment.

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Crystal Willer

Crystal Willer

Crystal Willer is the Associate Archivist at Lewis & Clark College's Watzek Library, whose Special Collections and Archives includes the Katherine Dunn Collection, donated to the college in 2016. The Katherine Dunn Collection contains over 40 linear feet of material created and collected by Dunn during her lifetime, including original manuscripts and draft publications, research notes, fan art and ephemeral material related to the Geek Love stage adaptations and screenplays, correspondence, interviews, personal ephemera, and more.
As a poet, Crystal Willer's work has appeared in The Spoon River Poetry Review, Territory, West Branch Wired, The Columbia Poetry Review, Weekday, and elsewhere. She earned an MFA in Poetry from Washington University in St. Louis in addition to her MLIS from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and daughters.

 

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