DEWITT HENRY

May 21, 2013 - 7:00pm

Prairie Lights

Dewitt Henry will read from his chapbook Visions of a Wayne Childhood. Visions of a Wayne Childhood is 21 brief sketches about growing up on the Philadelphia Main Line during the 1940s and 50s. Henry writes: “Contrary to the saying that you can’t go home again, at a lifetime’s distance, I believe that you can and should, and perhaps must, in memory and imagination. More than an exercise in nostalgia, I believe this to be an affirmation of distance and growth.” Or, as Bret Anthony Johnston, author of Corpus Christi: Stories, put it: “DeWitt Henry ushers his readers to better understandings of their own  histories.”

Dewitt Henry is the author of Sweet Dreams: a Family History, Safe Suicide: Essays, Narratives, and Mediations, and The Marriage of Anna Maye Potts, which won the Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel. He has edited numerous anthologies and is the founding editor of Ploughshares. He teaches at Emerson College.

BENJAMIN PERCY & ETHAN RUTHERFORD

May 28, 2013 - 7:00pm

Prairie Lights

Benjamin Percy will read from his new novel, Red Moon. "Red Moon is a serious, politically symbolic novel-a literary novel about lycanthropes. If George Orwell had imagined a future where the werewolf population had grown to the degree that they were colonized and drugged, this terrifying novel might be it." — John Irving
 

Benjamin Percy has won a Whiting Writers Award, a Plimpton Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is the author of the novel The Wilding and two short story collections, Refresh, Refresh and The Language of Elk. His work has appeared in Tin House and Best American Short Stories, as well as in many journals and magazines. He is the writer-in-residence at St. Olaf College and teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Pacific University.

Ethan Rutherford will read from his short story collection, The Peripatetic Coffin. Praised by literary greats from Charles Baxter to Ben Fountain and Alice Sebold, The Peripatetic Coffin is alternately funny, menacing, and deeply empathetic. Paul Yoon calls it, "My desert island book. The one I will always carry with me... each story is a vessel of longing and possibility; collectively, they present a mosaic of our past and our future, reinvigorating the art of storytelling... a revelatory feat of the imagination... an incomparable, vital debut.”

Ethan Rutherford's fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, One Story, American Short Fiction, and The Best American Short Stories. He lives in Minneapolis with his wife and son.

ANGELA ONWAUCHI-WILLIG

June 4, 2013 - 7:00pm

Prairie Lights

Angela Onwauchi-Willig will read from her book, According to Our Hearts. This landmark book looks at what it means to be a multiracial couple in the U.S. today. It begins with a look back at a 1925 case in which a two-month marriage ends with a man suing his wife for misrepresentation of her race, and shows how our society has yet to come to terms with interracial marriage. Onwuachi-Willig argues that housing law, family law, and employment law fail to protect multiracial couples. In a society in which marriage is used to give, withhold, and take away status—in the workplace and elsewhere—she says interracial couples are at a disadvantage, which is only exacerbated by current law.

Angela Onwuachi-Willig is a Professor of Law at the University of Iowa. Her articles have appeared in or are forthcoming in many prestigious law journals, including the Yale Law Journal, California Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, and Vanderbilt Law Review. Professor Onwuachi-Willig also has published numerous newspaper opinion-editorials.