(Beth Alvarado | Photo courtesy of Oregon State University – Cascades)
Beth Alvarado, a faculty author at Oregon State University – Cascades and recent Oregon Book Award winner, will read from her work during a free virtual event Thursday.
Alvarado will read from her forthcoming book Jillian in the Borderlands. She will be joined by four graduates of the university’s Low Residency Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program, all of whom have recently published and received recognition for their work.
The event, titled Tell it Slant, will take place at 6pm via YouTube and Facebook Live.
The phrase Tell it Slant is drawn from a poem by Emily Dickinson, in which she writes, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant –.”
“We named the reading ‘Tell It Slant’ after Dickinson’s poem to honor the impulse of using writing to witness, even if in a circuitous way,” Alvarado said. “No matter what genre we are writing, we are influenced by the world, struggle to shape our vision of it and hope to move and perhaps change those who hear us.”
Alvarado received the 2020 Oregon Book Award for Creative Nonfiction for her book of essays, Anxious Attachments.
The event will be hosted by Jennifer Reimer Recio, who recently joined OSU-Cascades and will lead the MFA program. An assistant professor of American studies, Reimer Recio writes about culture, race, gender and migration. Her first prose poetry book, The Rainy Season Diaries, was published in 2013. Prose poetry is poetry written in prose form instead of verse form. Her second, Keşke, is forthcoming from Airlie Press, where she is now a member of the editorial board.
The alumni authors are:
- Irene Cooper, who will read from Committal, a speculative and recently published spy-fi thriller, and from spare change, her poetry collection to be published by Finishing Line Press in 2021.
- Yola Gómez, whose poetry collection We’ve always been weeping and searching for the dead, won the 2020 Hybrid Poetry Chapbook Contest at Flying Ketchup Press.
- Tiffany Cates will read from her literary noir novel, M-theory, which will be published in early 2021.
- Brigitte Lewis will read from Origin Stories, which won the 2020 Iron Horse Press Chapbook Contest and will be published in December 2020.
Jenna Goldsmith, who served as an interim lead of the MFA program from July 2019 to August 2020, will conclude the program with a reading from her forthcoming poetry chapbook Suppose the room just got brighter.
To register for the reading event, visit osucascades.edu/tell-it-slant or events@oregonstate.edu.