The Creative Writing Department’s Visiting Writers Series (VWS) is delighted to announce its first event of the Fall 2013 season, featuring playwright and short story author Gary Amdahl and fiction and creative nonfiction author Alisa Slaughter.

Born and raised in Minnesota, Amdahl now lives in Redlands, California. Amdahl teaches fiction and nonfiction writing courses at the University of Redlands. During the 1980s, Amdahl’s plays were produced and he received two Jerome Fellowships at The Playwrights Lab in Minneapolis. Amdahl has also had his essays, stories and theatre and novel reviews printed in The New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, The Nation and many other publications. The Intimidator Still Lives In Our Hearts will be the first book of a series from the Artistically Declined Press, which will publish his work every January. The late author Barry Hannah describes the writer this way: “Amdahl is one whose gifts are staggering and hard won. The stories relate, by the way of guts through grace, the wholeness of a novel too good for mere philosophy.”

Slaughter, a faculty member at the University of Redlands, lives in the mountains of Southern California, near Redlands. She has published fiction and creative nonfiction in literary journals such as the Santa Monica Review, Natural Bridge, The Missouri Review and others. She is the winner of the 2012 Gold Line Press Chapbook Competition in Fiction. Dana Johnson says Bad Habitats, Slaughter’s new book, is “just such a remarkable read. Startling in its ambition and stunning in its achievements, the amalgamation of the animal and human leaves us with serious questions about who we think we are and who we want to be.”

Please join us for a reading by Gary Amdahl and Alisa Slaughter on Thursday, September 26 at 7:30 in Hall of Letters 100, to be followed by a reception and book-signing with the authors. This event is free and open to the public.

Upcoming events in the Visiting Writers Series will include authors Marianne Boruch on Thursday, October 10, and Kathleen Graber on November 14.

For more information, please contact the Creative Writing Department at (909) 748-8260.