Linfield University will host lectures from two celebrated writers in April as part of the “Readings at the Nick” series. Memoirist Apricot Irving speaks on April 4, then creative writer Claire O’Connor speaks on April 11. Both events are scheduled for 5:30 p.m. in the Jereld R. Nicholson Library’s Austin Reading Room. Readings at the Nick are free and open to the public.
As part of her visit on Tuesday, April 4, Oregon Book Award-winning writer Irving will discuss her 2019 work, “The Gospel of Trees.” Irving grew up as a missionary’s daughter in Haiti during a time of upheaval. Her father’s unswerving commitment to replant the deforested hillsides, despite growing political unrest, threatened to splinter his family. Drawing from her parents’ journals, as well as her own, Irving retraces the story of her family, the missionaries in the north of Haiti, and the shattered history of colonization. Beautiful, poignant, and explosive, “The Gospel of Trees” grapples with the complicated legacy of those who wish to improve the world, and bears witness to the defiant beauty of an undefeated country.
She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and Literary Arts Creative Nonfiction Fellowship. Her writing has appeared in Granta, On Being, Tin House, Oregon Humanities, Portland Monthly and Topic Magazine.
On Tuesday, April 11, O’Connor, who is currently Linfield University’s Renshaw Writer in Residence, will speak about her experience as a Scottish multi-genre fiction writer. O’Connor has worked with students of all ages in Morocco, Malaysia, New York, South Africa, California and Scotland, among others, and is currently exploring literary short- and novel-length fiction, environmental writing and ecocriticism with Linfield students.
She holds a B.A. in English from Yale; an MFA in creative writing from the University of Idaho and a doctorate in creative writing from the University of Edinburgh. A 2022 Best of the Net Finalist in Fiction, she was longlisted for the 2022 Discoveries Prize sponsored by the Women’s Prize, and she has previously won The Missouri Review’s Miller Audio Prize for prose.
For more information on either event, contact Joe Wilkins (jwilkins@linfield.edu), chair of Linfield’s English Department.
