Melissa Yancy to read from prize-winning book

Melissa Yancy '99Acclaimed California author Melissa Yancy, a 1999 Linfield alumna, will read from her book, “Dog Years,” on Thursday, Nov. 10, at 7:30 p.m. in the Austin Reading Room of the Jereld R. Nicholson Library at Linfield College.

The event will be streamed and archived on the Linfield Live Facebook page.

“Dog Years” explores Yancy’s personal experiences, from everyday frustrations to deeper experiences with hospitals and medicine. It was selected as the Drue Heinz Literature Prize and will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in October.

Watch a video as Yancy gives three tips for battling writers’ block.

Yancy is a fiction writer whose work has appeared in “Glimmer Train,” “One Story,” “Prairie Schooner, “Zyzzyva,” “The Missouri Review” and others. “Dog Years” and another one of her works, “Consider this Case,” received Special Mention in the 2016 Pushcart Prize XL. She is the recipient of the 2016 NEA Literature Fellowship and earned her M.P.W. from the professional writing program at the University of Southern California.

Author Anthony Doerr said “Dog Years” is cause for celebration.

“Melissa Yancy’s stories make me swoon with recognition,” he writes on the book’s back cover. “They’re funny and sad in the same breath; they’re incredibly well executed; they’re about the endlessly fascinating machinery of relationships, about the weird intersections of medical technology and human dignity, and about the ways time catches up with everyone in the end. I’ve been waiting a long time for her stories to be collected in a book.”

This reading is a part of the “Readings at the Nick” series. The lecture is free and open to the public. It is sponsored by the Linfield Nicholson Library and the Linfield English department. For more information, contact Susan Barnes Whyte at 503-883-2517 or swhyte@linfield.edu.