And now Elizabeth Evans.
It's nice for us at the Poetry Center
to be presenting a fiction writer,
gives us a chance to stretch the definition of poetry to include
that which is in a larger sense poetic.
And to relax into narrative.
Now, a narrative or a story as you may have heard
is the distinct issue these days in the world of poetry.
Poets who tell stories and poets who, for various reasons,
some of them French, defy to do so --
[LAUGHTER]
These camps have squared off now for a couple of decades
with the result that no poet who has come anywhere
near this argument can rivet into a good yarn
without looking over her or his shoulder.
But we don't have to worry about that tonight,
as we're going to hear a bit of a novel
in which form a story is not just allowed but essential.
We can surrender to the spell, fall
into the arms of narrative.
As Elizabeth Evans takes us, via her new book Rowing in Eden
into the lives of her characters Frannie and Rosamund Wahl,
sisters living through a summer of transformation in 1965
in Pynch Lake, Iowa.
Elizabeth Evans is an accomplished fiction writer.
The Washington --
Washington Post Book World called
her first book, The Blue Hour very much
a great American novel.
Evans' second novel, Carter Clay,
was selected by Los Angeles Times as one
of the best books of 1999.
Elizabeth Evans has been a fellow at MacDowell Colony,
an incredible writers' conference,
she's won the James Michener Fellowship for the novel,
and a fellowship from the National Endowment
for the Arts, which helped her write Rowing in Eden.
Elizabeth has been teaching here at the University since 1987.
She's one of the reasons for the stellar reputation
of the creative writing program here,
and she has read under the auspices of the Poetry Center
a couple of times previously one in 1987 and one in 1995.
We're happy to bring her back to the podium
for the debut of this new book, which is published just
last month from Harper Collins.
Please, give a warm welcome for one of our own,
the poet novelist Elizabeth Evans.
[APPLAUSE]