Saturday, November 5

Authors’ lunch features award-winning storytellers

Three noted Colorado authors will share insights on their latest books with Colorado Press Women and guests on Saturday morning, Nov. 5, at the new home of CPW member Gay Porter DeNileon, 13812 W. 59th Ave., Arvada.

Erika Krouse, whose latest book, “Tell Me Everything: The Story of a Private Investigation,” was recently featured on Colorado Public Radio’s Turn the Page series, will be joined by E.J. Levy, highlighting her historical novel “The Cape Doctor,” and Steven Schwartz, author of “The Tenderest of Strings.”

The annual CPW authors’ event begins at 9:30 a.m., with registration, and will end after lunch with a short business meeting. Lunch will be a variety of salads and sandwiches catered by Bread Winners Cafe & Catering. Cost is $25 for CPW members and $27 for nonmembers.

A writer of fiction and nonfiction, Erika Krouse teaches and mentors for the Book Project at Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver. She attended middle school and high school in Japan and earned her B.A. from Grinnell College and M.A. in English Literature & Creative Writing from the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she also taught creative writing classes. She is the offsite/traveling retreat coordinator for Lighthouse, instructing at The Himalayan Writing Retreat in Uttarakhand, India, and teaches yearly at the Grand Lake Retreat in Colorado. She has won fellowships and scholarships to the Longleaf Writers Conference, Bread Loaf Writers Workshop, Sewanee Writers Workshop and the inaugural Amtrak Residency.

“Tell Me Everything” is Krouse’s memoir of her time as an investigator for a lawyer who won a landmark civil case that changed the way Title IX is implemented and viewed at colleges and universities across the country. Although she never directly names the college or the people involved, the story is clearly about the football recruiting scandal at CU-Boulder during the early 2000s, when young women were sexually assaulted by football players and recruits, then ostracized by the university when they sought justice. Krouse weaves her own experience of sexual abuse throughout her narrative, and the result is a compelling page turner told with lyric beauty and subtle humor.

E.J. Levy is an associate professor of English at Colorado State University, where she teaches in the MFA program. She has a degree in history from Yale and an MFA from Ohio State University. She has been a film magazine editor in Manhattan and a writer in residence for the Aspen Institute. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, Best American Essays, Orion, Salon, Salmagundi, The Nation, Kenyon Review and The New York Times, and was twice named among Distinguished Stories in Best American Short Stories. She received a Pushcart Prize, Chicago Literary Award, Michener Fellowship, Loft-McKnight Fellowship, Nelson Algren Finalist Prize, and has published two collections of short stories and edited another.

Her debut novel, “The Cape Doctor,” is the story of Dr. James Miranda Barry, a nineteenth-century Irish-born physician who was assigned female at birth but took on a male persona to obtain an education and practice medicine professionally. A brilliant medical student in Edinburgh and London, then an eligible bachelor and quick-tempered physician in Cape Town, South Africa, Dr. Perry befriends the aristocratic Cape Governor and rises to the pinnacle of society. When publicly accused of a homosexual affair, the doctor and the governor nearly lose their lives. The book was named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and one of Barnes & Noble’s “100 Best Books of Summer,” and won a Colorado Book Award.

Steven Schwartz is a Professor Emeritus of English at Colorado State University, where he taught in the MFA Creative Writing Program. He also taught at the Warren Wilson College Low-Residency MFA Program and Lighthouse Writers Workshop. His fiction has received the Nelson Algren Award, Sherwood Anderson Prize, Cohen Award, Colorado Book Award, two O. Henry Prize Story Awards, Foreword Review Gold Medal for Short Stories and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell and Bread Loaf. He is currently fiction editor for the Colorado Review.

His third novel, “The Tenderest of Strings” tells the story of Reuben and Ardith Rosenfeld and their two children as they move from Chicago to the fictional small town of Welton, Colorado, where Reuben purchases the local paper. Ardith stays home and copes with the task of fixing up an older house in great disrepair and carries on a secret affair. One night, after a cookout at friends’ farm, a fatal hit-and-run shocks the community, exposes a secret and rips apart the Rosenfeld family. Like most of Schwartz’s work, “The Tenderest of Strings” focuses on families and their psychological motivations.

Registration for the authors’ lunch can be made via PayPal/credit card using the registration below (a processing fee has been added) or by mailing a check to Teresa Ford (email her for address), by Friday, Oct. 28.

Parking is limited, so please carpool to the event if possible. Also, out-of-town members are encouraged to contact their CPW friends in the metro area as many have guest bedrooms and welcome visitors who want to attend the event.

Registrants

Member $26.00 USD Guest $28.00 USD Member $26.00 USD Guest $28.00 USD

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