Helena Festival of the Book 2009
Guest Authors

Sarah Carter

(Women in Montana History panel – Friday 2:00 pm)

Sarah Carter is from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan and she received her history degrees from the University of Saskatchewan and University of Manitoba. She taught history at the University of Calgary for 14 years and is now with the Department of History and Classics, and Faculty of Native Studies of the University of Alberta. Her research has focused on the Great Plains of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with a focus on the “contact zone” between Aboriginal people and immigrants.  She is currently working on a history of land grants, gender and Indigenous people in the Great Plains of the North American West and settler dominions.  Her book, Montana Women Homesteaders: A Field of One’s Own has just been issued by Farcountry Press.

George Economou

(Gala reading Friday at 7:00 pm; Poetics Lecture Saturday 1:00 pm

George Economou was born in Great Falls, Montana, on September 24, 1934. He has published eight books of poetry, the latest of which is Ananios of Kleitor, and several books on medieval literature.  He has also published translations from ancient and modern Greek as well as from a number of medieval languages.  His poems, translations, and criticism have appeared in many leading literary and scholarly journals.  He has held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the New York Council for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation for the Bellagio Center, and twice from the National Endowment for the Arts. Following his education in the public schools of Great Falls, he earned his A.B. from Colgate University and his M.A. and Ph. D. from Columbia University in English and Comparative Literature.  He taught for forty-one years at Wagner College, Long Island University, Hunter College, Columbia, and for the last seventeen years of his academic career at the University of Oklahoma, where he served for eight years as department chair of English and then as director of creative writing. He retired in 2000 and now lives with his wife, poet-playwright Rochelle Owens, in Philadelphia and Wellfleet, Massachusetts. Interview with George Economou

Chris Dombrowski

(Gala reading Friday at 7:00 pm; Writing Poetry Workshop Saturday 9:00 am)

Chris Dombrowski’s poems have appeared in Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, Denver Quarterly, Orion, Poetry, and others. His chapbook, Fragments with Dusk in Them, was published by Punctilious Press, and his first full-length collection, By Cold Water, was just published by Wayne State University Press. A recent recipient of a writing fellowship from the UCROSS Foundation, Chris lives with his family in Missoula, and teaches for the Writing Collaborative at CS Porter, DeSmet, and with Common Ground.

Fred Haefele

(Writing Memoir Workshop Saturday 9:00 am)

Fred Haefele’s essays have appeared in Outside, Wired, The New York Times Magazine, American Heritage, and other publications. He has received literary fellowships from The Fine Arts Work Center, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Stanford University. He is the author of the motorcycle memoir Rebuilding the Indian (Riverhead Books, 1998, Bison Books, 2005), and most recently published an essay in Salon.com. Haefele has taught creative writing at the University of Montana and at Stanford, where he was a Jones Lecturer. He lives in Helena with his wife, writer Caroline Patterson, and two children.

Sue Hart

(Humanities Panel Friday at noon)

Sue Hart has taught in the English & Philosophy Department at Montana State University-Billings for 45 years. She is the author of The Call to Care, the history of St. Vincent Hospital, Yellow-Stone & Blue, a history of the first 75 years of Montana State University-Billings, and Thomas and Elizabeth Savage, a monograph in the BSU Western Writers Series. She has written numerous articles for professional publications and magazines about Montana authors and their works and other Montana subjects, and makes frequent presentations around the state on literary topics. She was the scriptwriter and a co-producer of a MontanaPBS documentary on Dorothy M. Johnson, “Gravel in Her Gut & Spit in Her Eye,” which was a finalist for the 2006 Spur Award given by Western Writers of America., and associate-producer of “Paradise & Purgatory: Hemingway at the L–T and St. Vincent Hospital,” also a MontanaPBS documentary. She is the recipient of a Governor’s Award in the Humanities, a Governor’s Award for AIDS Education, the Montana Historical Society’s Trustees Educator’s Award, a PEN Award for Syndicated Fiction, and, most recently, a WILLA Award for creative non-fiction.

Laurie Lamon

(Gala reading Saturday 7:00 pm)

Laurie Lamon has taught poetry workshops and literature seminars at Whitworth College in Spokane, WA, since 1985, after receiving her doctorate from the University of Utah. Her poems has appeared in many journals and magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, The New Criterion, Arts & Letters Journal of Contemporary Culture, Ploughshares, Colorado Review, and Poetry Northwest. She is the recipient of a Graves Award in 2002, and a Pushcart Prize in 2001 for the poem “Pain Thinks of the Beautiful Table.” In 2007, Lamon was given a Witter Bynner Fellowship Award by the Library of Congress. Her second volume of poems, Without Wings, was published in 2009 by CavanKerry Press. She lives with her husband, William Siems.

 

Samuel Ligon

(Gala reading Friday 7:00 pm; Writing Fiction Workshop Saturday 9:00 am)

Samuel Ligon is the author of a collection of stories, Drift and Swerve (Autumn House 2009), and a novel, Safe in Heaven Dead (HarperCollins 2003).  His stories have appeared in The Quarterly, Alaska Quarterly Review, StoryQuarterly, Noise: Fiction Inspired by Sonic Youth, Post Road, Keyhole, Gulf Coast, New England Review, and elsewhere. The title story from Drift and Swerve was included as a recommended story in the 2008 O. Henry Prize Stories. A recipient of a 2005 Artists Trust/Washington State Arts Commission Fellowship, Sam is also the editor of Willow Springs.

 

Karl Olson

(Humanities Panel Friday at noon)

Karl Olson is a native of Idaho and grew up in the Northwest, Alaska, and Western Canada. He works for Missoula Public Library, and the Missoula Public Library Foundation. In 2008 Olson curated Montana's first "Out at the Library" exhibit and event series devoted to regional lesbian and gay literature, history and culture; in 2009 he was co-curator of Missoula’s “Inside Mockingbird” program exploring the life and work of Harper Lee. His article “Brokeback Mountain’s Montana Slope” was published in the Spring 2006 issue of Drumlummon Views, and his chapter “West of Desire: Queer Ambivalence in Montana Literature” appears in the anthology All Our Stories Are Here: Critical Perspectives on Montana Literature (2009).

 

Wendy Parciak

(Gala reading Friday 7:00 pm)

Wendy Parciak has a PhD in ecology from The University of Montana, and has worked as a wilderness ranger and biologist for numerous state and federal agencies.  She also studied cello at the Julliard School of Music.  She lives in Missoula, Montana with her husband, young son and three very active border collies.  She wrote Requiem for Locusts, her first novel, to explore how people react when confronted by a psychotic individual whose life is more out of control than their own. She based much of her knowledge on her own mentally-ill sister, who was diagnosed after years of visual and auditory hallucinations with a genetic disorder called Velocardiofacial syndrome.

Jim Rains

(Good Words Lecture Saturday 2:30 pm)

Jim Rains teaches on the Native American Studies faculty at Montana State University – Billings. Jim earned a B.A. from Rocky Mountain College, a M.A. from the University of Montana and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. Jim is also an enrolled member of the Creek Nation of Oklahoma. Jim has taught at the college-level and written about twentieth-century American literature since 1990. Among the subjects about which he has taught and written are American Naturalism, the American West and Native American Literature. Jim is a contributor to the recently published anthology of critical essays about Montana literature titled All of Our Stories Are Here: Critical Perspectives on Montana Literature (University of Nebraska Press, 2009).

 

 

Steven Rinella

(Gala reading Saturday 7:00 pm)

Steven Rinella is the author of American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon and The Scavenger's Guide to Haute Cuisine. He's a correspondent for Outside magazine, and his writing has also appeared in many other publications, including Men's Journal,  the New York Times, Bowhunter, the New Yorker, Field and Stream, Big Sky Journal, Salon.com, Nerve.com, and the anthologies Best American Travel Writing and Best Food Writing. He was born in Twin Lake, Michigan, and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.

 

Alan Weltzien

(Literary Heritage Lecture Thursday 7:00 pm; Humanities Panel Friday 2:00 pm)

Weltzien is a native of Washington state and now in lives Dillon, Montana where he is an English professor at the University of Montana Western (UMW). He earned his masters and Ph.D at the University of Virginia and attended Whitman College as an undergraduate. Weltzien is the recipient of two Fulbright Fellowships (Poland, Bulgaria) and a University of Montana Faculty Exchange Award (Australia). In the course of his life, he spent his childhood and young adulthood in Washington state, and went on to reside in three regions of the U.S. and three countries abroad.

Weltzien is known for his scholarly anthologies of writers Rick Bass (2001) and John McPhee (2003), both with the University of Utah Press. At UMW he teaches and writes about a wealth of contemporary Montana and western American writers. Most recently, Weltzien received outstanding reviews for The Norman Maclean Reader, a collection of miscellaneous essays, selected letters to four valued friends, and one interview. Weltzien's newest work is a memoir, A Father and an Island:  Reflections on Loss (Lewis-Clark Press, 2008).