Please join us for the second event of the Spring 2016 Hallie Ford Literary Series at Willamette University: a reading by Sarah Sentilles and Rick Barot, on Wednesday, March 2, at 7:30 p.m. in the Hatfield Room of Willamette’s library. The event is free and open to the public, and books will be for sale courtesy of the Willamette Store.

Sarah Sentilles is a nonfiction writer, scholar of religion, critical theorist, and author of three books, including her recent memoir Breaking Up with God: A Love Story. She earned a bachelor’s degree at Yale and master’s and doctoral degrees at Harvard. At the core of her scholarship, writing, and activism is a commitment to investigating the roles language, images, and practices play in oppression, violence, social transformation, and justice movements. She is currently the Mark and Melody Teppola Presidential Distinguished Visiting Professor at Willamette University, teaching courses in religious studies, art, and creative writing. In 2016-17, she will be Chair of the MA in Critical Theory + Creative Research at Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland. She is currently working on a book about art and war titled Draw Your Weapons.

Poet Rick Barot is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Chord (2015), currently a finalist for the PEN Open Book Award for best book of the year by a writer of color. Born in the Philippines and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, he attended Wesleyan University, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and Stanford University, where he was a Stegner Fellow in Poetry and later a Jones Lecturer in Poetry. Barot’s first collection of poetry, The Darker Fall(2002), received the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry. His second collection, Want(2008), was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards and won the 2009 Grub Street Book Prize. His poems and essays have appeared in the New Republic, Poetry, the Kenyon Review, the Virginia Quarterly Review, and others. The recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Barot has taught at numerous universities including Stanford, California College of the Arts, George Washington University, and Lynchburg College. He currently resides in Tacoma, Washington, and teaches at Pacific Lutheran University.

Read an interview with Sarah here: http://religiondispatches.org/ibreaking-up-with-godi-i-didnt-lose-my-faith-i-left-it/

And read Rick’s poem “Tarp” here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/245802

Scott Nadelson