Lance Olsen @ CCC

Former Idaho Writer-in-Residence and Fulbright Scholar Lance Olsen will read at noon in the Literary Arts Center on Tuesday, April 5.

Olsen, who holds an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers Workshop and a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia, is author of six novels, four critical studies, four short-story collections, a poetry chapbook, and a textbook about fiction writing, as well as editor of two collections of essays about innovative contemporary fiction. His short stories, essays, poems, and reviews have appeared in a wide variety of journals and anthologies, including Fiction International, Iowa Review, Village Voice, Time Out, BOMB, Gulf Coast, and Best American Non-Required Reading. A Pushcart Prize recipient and former Idaho Writer-in-Residence, his work has been translated into Italian, Polish, and Finnish. His novel Tonguing the Zeitgeist was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award. For ten years he taught as associate and then full professor at the University of Idaho; for two he directed the University of Idaho's M.F.A. program. He has also taught at the University of Iowa, the University of Virginia, the University of Kentucky, on summer and semester-abroad programs in Oxford and London, on a Fulbright in Finland, and elsewhere. He serves as Chair of the Board of Directors at Fiction Collective Two; founded in 1974, FC2 is one of America's best-known ongoing literary experiments and progressive art communities. He lives with his wife, assemblage-artist Andi Olsen, in the mountains of central Idaho. They have traveled widely in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Europe. Olsen's seventh novel, 10:01, will appear with a complementary hypermedia component in the spring of 2005, and his eighth, Nietzsche's Kisses, in the spring of 2006.