Ars Poetica presents Debra Earling at May 6th reading in Pierce Library

Published: April 27, 2004

Contact: David Axelrod
541-962-3633

Debra Magpie Earling will be reading at the May 6 Ars Poetica.

La Grande -- Ars Poetica, the Native American Program, and the Lecture Committee present an evening with
award-winning author of PERMA RED, Debra Magpie Earling, on Thursday, May 6, at 7:30 p.m. in the Pierce Library Reference Room.

Earling's reading is free and a book signing will follow.

Praise for Debra Earling

"PERMA RED is a startlingly spiritual novel of the lives and loves and heartbreak on a Montana reservation. The characters, especially the strangely destructive lovers, Louise and Baptiste, are so sharply drawn that they will bring tears to your eyes. And the landscape, the richly detailed backdrop against which these characters play out their roles, adds dimension that borders on mythic. Debra Magpie Earling is a truly gifted writer, and PERMA RED is a wonder-filled gift to all of us."
--James Welch

"Earling's writing is ominous, tethered to a time and place and the havoc they wreaked on Indian life. Hers is a fever of a story, keenly fighting for air and answers."
--San Francisco Chronicle

"Earling weaves the power of belief into the fabric of the story in a way that lightens and redeems the lives of all her characters."
--Minneapolis Star Tribune

"This novel keeps you on hyper-alert as you read, alive, alive to the world it conjures."
--Alan Cheuse, All Things Considered

* * *

Earling will be the next reader in the Ars Poetica Literary Reading Series.

Earling is the author of PERMA RED, which won the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award for fiction in 2003. The book also received the Mountains and Plains Bookseller Association Award, the Western Writers Association Spur Award for Best Novel of the West, and the Medicine Pipe Bearer Award for Best First Novel.

Debra Earling shared the 2003 Willa Literary Award with writer Judy Blunt.

A member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Indian Reservation, she teaches at the University of Montana in Missoula. She grew up in Spokane and earned her BA at the University of Washington in Seattle and her MFA from Cornell, where she was a Ford Foundation Doctoral Fellow from 1988-91.

She was the first public defender in the tribal court system and is one of 15 American writers nationwide selected to participate in the National Millennium Survey Project which will showcase 35 photographers and 15 writers in a major museum project that will tour seven U.S. cities as well as Europe and Asia from 2002-2005.

Her work has appeared in Ploughshares and Northeast Indian Quarterly and in numerous anthologies, including: Reinventing the Enemy's Language; Song of the Turtle; Wild Women: Contemporary Short Stories Celebrating Women; Circle of Women; Talking Leaves: An Anthology of Contemporary Native American Short Stories (Craig Lesley, ed); The Last Best Place: A Montana Anthology.

PERMA RED is her first novel

Contact Information

University Advancement Eastern Oregon University One University Boulevard La Grande, OR 97850 phone 541.962.3740 fax 541.962.3680 email University Advancement