Novelist Robin Oliveira will present her debut novel, “My Name is Mary Sutter,” Wednesday, Nov. 10, at 7:30 p.m. in the Jereld R. Nicholson Library at Linfield College.
In Oliveira’s historical novel, published by Viking, Mary Sutter is a brilliant, headstrong midwife from Albany, N.Y., who dreams of becoming a surgeon. She leaves home and travels to Washington, D.C., to tend to soldiers wounded in the Civil War, determined to overcome the prejudices against women in medicine and eager to run away from recent heartbreak. Under the guidance of William Stipp and James Blevens, two surgeons who fall in love with Sutter’s courage, and resisting her mother’s pleas to return home to help with the birth of her twin sister’s baby, Sutter continues to pursue her medical career.
Oliveira grew up just outside Albany, N.Y. She received her B.A. in Russian and studied at the Pushkin Language Institute in Moscow, U.S.S.R. She is a registered nurse and received her MFA in writing in 2006 from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and won the James Jones First Novel Fellowship in 2007. Oliveira is the parent of Linfield junior creative writing major, Miles Oliveira.
The reading, which is free and open to the public, is sponsored by Nicholson Library and the Linfield English Department. For more information contact Susan Barnes Whyte at 503-883-2517 or swhyte@linfield.edu.
