For Immediate Release

Contact:
City Art Director Joel Long: joeltlong@yahoo.com

Klancy Clark de Nevers and Scott Abbott at City Art

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

Wednesday December 12th,   7:00—9:00 P.M.

            Writers Klancy Clark de Nevers and Scott Abbot will read from their work December 12th at the Salt Lake City Public Library at 7:00 P.M. as part of the City Art Reading Series. 

Klancy Clark de Nevers is the author of the new memoir, Lessons in Printing and

The Colonel and the Pacifist: Karl Bendetsen, Perry Saito and the Incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II (University of Utah Press, April 2004).

 is a printer’s daughter who grew up proofreading, doing bindery work and numbering ballots in her father’s business, Quick Print Co. in Aberdeen, Washington. The rush to get the Grays Harbor Post out every Friday night gave structure to her family’s week. During World War II four of her uncles were in the armed forces and by observing how closely her family followed the progress of the war, she gained an enduring interest in the history of that era. She graduated from Weatherwax High School (where she had been editor of The Ocean Breeze) in 1951.

In 1970 she earned a Master’s Degree in Mathematics from the University of Utah. After a varied career in technical and managerial positions that allowed her to use her mathematical and computing skills, she retired to focus on writing. With Lucy Hart of Seattle, she edited Cohassett Beach Chronicles: World War II in the Pacific Northwest by Kathy Hogan, a book of Hogan’s columns from the wartime pages of the Grays Harbor Post. Her poem “Curator” won first place in the City Weekly literary competition in September 2000. She served as treasurer for City Art, a grass roots literary organization that presents readings each week in the Salt Lake City Public Library, and is active on the board of Writers@Work, which presents a nationally known writing conference held at the Alta Lodge in the Wasatch Mountains near Salt Lake City, Utah.

Her latest book is The Colonel and the Pacifist: Karl Bendetsen, Perry Saito and the Incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II (University of Utah Press, April 2004).

Scott Abbott is the author of Immortal for Quite Some Time from the Universtiy of Utah Press.  "This is not a memoir,” he writes. “Rather, this is a fraternal meditation on the question 'Are we friends, my brother?’ The story is uncertain, the characters are in flux, the voices are plural, the photographs are as troubled as the prose. This is not a memoir.”

Thus Scott Abbott introduces the reader to his exploration of the life of his brother John, a man who died of AIDS in 1991 at the age of forty. Writing about his brother, he finds he is writing about himself and about the warm-hearted, educated, and homophobic LDS family that forged the core of his identity.

Winner of the book manuscript prize in creative nonfiction in the Utah Arts Council’s Original Writing Competition, Scott Abbott is professor of humanities, philosophy, and integrated studies at Utah Valley University.

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.