Author of Desert Gothic to Present Reading of His Work
Author of Desert Gothic to Present Reading of His Work
Award-winning Don Waters to appear at The College of Wooster on Nov. 18
Date & Time
Wed, Nov 18
4:00 PM
Location
Kauke Hall (Room 244)
400 East University Street
Contact
John Finn
330-263-2145
Email
Don Waters, author of Desert Gothic, will give a reading of his works on Nov. 18 at The College of Wooster.
WOOSTER, Ohio - Don Waters, author of Desert Gothic, which received the 2009 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award for Fiction, will give a reading of his work on Wednesday, Nov. 18, at The College of Wooster. The event, which is free and open to the public, will be held in Room 244 of Kauke Hall (400 E. University St.), beginning at 4 p.m.
Katherine Boyle from Booklist writes: "In Waters's debut story collection, also the winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award, a good man is never hard to find.
Although, crusted with the grit of the Southwest desert, he may be hard to spot. Waters portrays a crematorium worker, an obsessive ultra-marathoner, a drug dealer, a reclusive writer, an illegal immigrant runner, a vagrant, a cuckold, and a sinning missionary, among others, revealing something redemptive in his peculiar and wonderful characterization of each. The crematorium worker makes a lonely trip across searing hot desert roads to deliver an urn. The ultra-marathoner finds love in the midst of fierce competition. And the drug dealer risks imprisonment to help a nursing home-bound man obtain a prescription from Mexico. In each tale, Waters unveils an unlikely hero up against great odds in a world that often seems bereft of meaning. As their stories unfold in the vast terrain, each character's life forms a grain of truth amid sweeping desert sands."
Waters was born and raised in Reno, Nev., and now lives in Santa Fe, N.M. He has received numerous honors for his writing, including fellowships from the Virginia Center for the
Creative Arts and the Jentel Foundation, as well as the McGinnis-Ritchie Award from the Southwest Review. His stories have been published in such venues as
Epoch, StoryQuarterly, the Kenyon Review, the Santa Monica Review, ZYZZYVA, the
Cimarron Review, and Grain.
Waters's appearance is sponsored by the Department of English and the Donaldson Fund. Additional information is available by phone (330-263-2575) or e-mail.