Visiting author, artist duo

Visiting author, artist duo give presentation & screening June 16

Contact: David Axelrod, Professor of English, 541-962-3633 or daxelrod@eou.edu

LA GRANDE, Ore. June 6, 2016 – Writer Lance Olsen and artist Andi Olsen are giving a talk and screening of their recent collaborative work Thursday, June 16 at Eastern Oregon University.

Their talk begins at 1 p.m. in Badgley Hall, Room 148 and the screening will be held in the same room at 7:30 that evening. Both events are free and open to the public.

Lance is the author of 12 novels, one hypertext, five nonfiction works, five short-story collections, a poetry chapbook and two anti-textbooks about innovative writing. He is also the editor of two collections of essays about innovative contemporary fiction.

His short stories, essays, poems and reviews have appeared in hundreds of journals, magazines and anthologies, including Basalt, Conjunctions, Black Warrior Review, Fiction International, Iowa Review, Hotel Amerika, Village Voice, McSweeney’s and Best American Non-Required Reading.

He is a Guggenheim and N.E.A. fellowship recipient, winner of the Berlin Prize, Berlin Artist-in-Residence grant, Pushcart Prize and is a former governor-appointed Idaho Writer-in-Residence. His novel “Tonguing the Zeitgeist” was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award, and his work has been translated into Italian, Polish, Turkish, Finnish and Portuguese.

Lance currently teaches experimental narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah. Along with his wife, Andi, an assemblage-artist and filmmaker, he divides his time between Salt Lake City, Berlin, Germany and the mountains of central Idaho.

Andi’s ongoing project, “Hideous Beauty,” is a Cabinet of Wonders composed of short films, assemblages and collage texts exploring the idea of monstrosity and the generative possibilities inherent in the processes of decay.

Her films have been exhibited at the American Visionary Art Museum and screened at the Los Angeles International Short Film Festival, The Mutter Museum and at literary and artistic events in Paris, Berlin, Cologne, Szeged, Banff and elsewhere across the United States.

Her art has also been exhibited and published around the country and abroad. She has collaborated with her writer-husband on computer-generated collage texts, as well as a short film about Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, Theories of Forgetting and a video tribute to Kathy Acker.

The Carl and Sandra Ellston Ars Poetica Literary Reading Series and EOU’s low-residency master of fine arts in creative writing program are sponsoring the Olsen’s presentations.

For more information about the events or EOU’s program, contact David Axelrod at 541-962-3633 or daxelrod@eou.edu.