In keeping with this year's theme of "Biography: Written Lives," on Sunday, September 11th at 2:00 PM, poet, author, and educator Lisa Sandlin will read excerpts from her newest work You Who Make the Sky Bend, a collaborative work on thirty-one Christian saints as archetypes of the human condition combined with original art by Catherine Ferguson of New Mexico. When asked about the work, Sandlin notes she utilized both ancient and contemporary sources about each subject and wove them into mini-narratives. She says, "The saints were born. They lived. They sinned. They were real people. Their human qualities and imperfections are what make their spirituality even more fascinating."
A native of Beaumont, Texas, Lisa is a professor of Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska-Omaha. She is also the author of The Famous Thing About Death (Cinco Puntos 1991) and Message to the Nurse of Dreams (Cinco Puntos 1997), which won the Violet Crown Award from the Austin Writers League and the Jesse H Jones Award from the Texas Institute of Letters, and a collection of short stories, In the River Province (Southern Methodist University Press 2004). Her writing has appeared in Shenandoah, The New York Times, Southwest Review, Crazy Horse, Story Quarterly, and elsewhere. The recipient of the NEA Fellowship, a Dobie Paisano Fellowship, and a Pushcart Prize, she received her BA from Rice University and her MFA from Vermont College. She is also co-editor of Times of Sorrow, Times of Grace (Backwaters Press), which was named the Poetry Honor Book and won Best Cover Design/Illustration in the 2003 Nebraska Book Awards.
This event is free and open to the public.
