Kinship of Rivers: Readings by Wang Ping & Rick Bass

Monday, 08 Apr 2013 at 7:00 pm – Sun Room, Memorial Union

Wang Ping grew up on a small island in the East China Sea. Her Kinship of Rivers project focuses on the destructive effects of China's globalization and modernization on natural and cultural landscapes. Wang Ping's books include two collections of poetry, The Magic Whip and Of Flesh & Spirit; a novel, Foreign Devil; and two fiction collections, American Visa and The Last Communist Virgin. She attended Beijing University, earned her PhD from New York University and now teaches creative writing at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Author and environmentalist Rick Bass is the author of more than twenty books, including the autobiographical Why I Came West. His 2002 collection, The Hermit's Story, was a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. A Texan by birth, Bass worked as a gas and oil geologist in Mississippi after earning a degree from Utah State University. His career as an author grew out of a pastime of writing short stories during his lunch breaks. He now lives in the Yaak Valley in the northern Rockies. Part of the Wildness, Wilderness & the Environmental Imagination Series

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Wang Ping's other publications include a book of Chinese folklore, The Dragon Emperor, and the cultural study Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China.

Her work has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Loft Literary Center, and the Bush Foundation. The Last Communist Virgin was awarded the 2008 Minnesota Book Award and the 2007 Book Award from the Association for Asian American Studies.

In 2007, her photographic exhibit, "Behind the Gate," documented the impacts on the Three Gorges Dam. A second exhibit in 2008, "All Roads to Lhasa," examined changes resulting from the construction of a new railway into Tibet.

In 1987 Rick Bass moved to the Yaak Valley in the northern Rockies, where he has been active in protecting the land from roads and logging and serves on the board of the Yaak Valley Forest Council and Round River Conservation Studies.

His first short story collection, The Watch, set in Texas, won the PEN/Nelson Algren Award. He is also the author of the short story collection The Lives of Rocks and the novel, Nashville Chrome, draws on the rise and fall of the Brown trio, the true-life country music trailblazers who pioneered the 1950s sound from which the novel takes its title.

Cosponsored By:

• MFA Program in Creative Writing & Environment
• Committee on Lectures (funded by Student Government)