02-12-07

Media Release

Acclaimed Author Antonya Nelson to Give Reading at OSU

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Novelist and short story writer Antonya Nelson will visit Oregon State University on Friday, Feb. 16, to give a reading from her acclaimed new volume of stories “Some Fun.”

The event begins at 7:30 p.m. in the Valley Library’s first floor rotunda, and is free and open to the public.

Nelson’s visit is sponsored by the OSU Visiting Writers Series, and supported by the Valley Library, the Office of the Provost, and the OSU Department of English.

A writer known for her compassionate and edgy portraits of American family life, Nelson has received several of the nation’s top awards for fiction writing, including the Rea Award for the Short Story and the Flannery O’Connor Prize. She recently was named by New Yorker magazine as one of the “20 young fiction writers for the new millennium.”

Critic and novelist Francine Prose said that “Nelson has a pitch-perfect ear for the rhythms and unspoken subtexts of domestic life, and especially for the ways a family balances old grudges with the need to practice forgiveness.”

The late short story master Raymond Carver praised her work for “what the best young writers have to offer -- a kind of pizzazz, the love of undercurrent, of voyeuristic intensity, a bewildered fascination with ritual as it has been undermined in our time, yet sustained, too, in an oddly moving way.”

Nelson is the author of five short story collections: “Some Fun” (2006), “Female Trouble” (2002), “Family Terrorists” (1994), “In the Land of Men” (1992), and “The Expendables” (1990). She also is the author of three novels: “Living to Tell” (2000), “Nobody’s Girl” (1998) and “Talking in Bed” (1996). Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, Harpers, Redbook and other magazines, as wells as in anthologies such as Prize Stories, the O. Henry Awards, and Best American Short Stories.

She divides her time between Telluride, Colo., and Houston, Texas, where she shares, with her husband novelist Robert Boswell, the Cullen Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Houston.