City Art Presents Julie Checkoway and Lance Larsen

Salt Lake Public Library Main Branch
210 East 400 South
Salt Lake City UT 84111

Wednesday March 9th 7:00—9:00 P.M.
 
            Writer Julie Checkoway and Utah’s Poet Laureate Lance Larsen will present their work on March 9th at the Salt Lake City Public Library at 7:00 P.M. as part of the City Art Reading Series. 

Julie Checkoway is a documentary filmmaker and the author of The Three-Year Swim Club, which has received wide critical praise and has been on the Best Selling Sports Books list in The New York Times.  Checkoway is also the author of the book  Little Sister: Searching for the Shadow World of Chinese Women (Viking Penguin) and the editor of the bestselling Creating Fiction. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Salt Lake Tribune, and Huffington Post. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Huffington Post, and numerous anthologies.  In 2001, she gave up tenure at the University of Houston (where she had been a professor and director of the creative writing program) and while producing and reporting radio stories for NPR’s Morning Edition and PRI’s This American Life, she came across the story of artist Billy Pappas.  With the encouragement of her older brother, she set out to make Waiting for Hockney, her first film.  She graduated from Harvard College, the Iowa Writers Workshop, and the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts individual artist grant and fellowships at writers’ colonies, including Yaddo. She lives in Salt Lake City with her husband and two daughters.
 
 
Lance Larsen’s fourth collection of poems, Genius Loci, was recently published by University of Tampa Press.  His earlier collections include Backyard Alchemy (2009), In All Their Animal Brilliance (2005), and Erasable Walls (1998).  He holds a PhD from the University of Houston.  His work appears widely, in such venues as Georgia Review, Southern Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, River Styx, Orion, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Best American Poetry 2009, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere.  His nonfiction has twice made the Notable Essay list in Best American Essays.  He is currently working on Seventeen Ways to Float, a collection of essays about place, family, and memory, which won 1st place in the 2011 Utah Original Writing Competition.  He grew up in Idaho and Colorado and lived in Chile for two years while serving an LDS mission.  He collects antiques, plays basketball, occasionally walks on his hands, grows daylilies, hikes, and loves Indian and Thai food.  He sometimes collaborates with his wife, Jacqui Biggs Larsen, a painter and multi-media artist.  Since 1993 he has taught literature and creative writing at BYU, where he currently serves as associate chair.  He and Jacqui recently directed a study abroad program in Madrid.  In 2012, he was named to a five-year term as Utah Poet Laureate.
 
Most featured readings are followed by an open reading. City Art is sponsored by the Utah Arts Council, the Salt Lake City Arts Council, Catalyst, the Salt Lake City Public Library, Xmission, and the Zoo, Arts, and Park Fund.
 
The event is free and open to the public.  City Art is sponsored by the Utah Arts Council, the Salt Lake City Arts Council, Zoo, Arts, and Parks, X-mission, and audience donations. 
 
 
 
 
 
Joel Long