PORT TOWNSEND — Critically acclaimed novelist Cara Hoffman will hold a reading and book signing Sunday at Fort Worden State Park, Buiding 204.
The event, held from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m., is free and open to the public.
Then on Thursday, award-winning poet Mark Doty will hold a reading and book signing at the same time at 204 Battery Way.
The readings are presented by Goddard College as part of its Creative Writing Program’s Visiting Writers’ Series.
Hoffman
Hoffman, a Goddard College alumna, will read from her most recent novel, Be Safe I Love You.
The novel was nominated for a Folio Prize, named one of the Five Best Modern War Novels by the Telegraph UK, and won a Global Filmmakers Award at Sundance in 2015.
Hoffman also is the author of the critically acclaimed novel, So Much Pretty.
That novel was named Best Suspense novel of 2011 by The New York Times Book Review.
Originally from upstate New York, Hoffman dropped out of high school to work full time, bought a one-way ticket to London and spent the next three years traveling and working under the table jobs in Europe and the Middle East.
Hoffman received no high school diploma nor undergraduate degree.
In the 1990s, she returned to the United States and found a job delivering newspapers, which eventually led to work as a staff reporter, covering environmental issues, politics and crime.
She was admitted to Goddard College’s Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program, graduating in 2009.
She is the recipient of a number of awards, including New York State Foundation for the Arts fellowship for her work on the aesthetics of violence.
She has been a visiting writer at St. John’s, Columbia and Oxford Universities. Her essays have appeared on NPR and in Salon, Marie Claire, The New York Times and The New York Times Book Review.
Doty
Doty, a Goddard College alumnus and former faculty member is a prolific and distinguished writer, event organizers said.
He is the author of three memoirs: the New York Times-bestselling Dog Years, Firebird and Heaven’s Coast, as well as a book about craft and criticism, The Art of Description: World Into Word, part of the Art of series published by Graywolf Press.
Doty currently is working on a memoir focusing on his poetic relationship with Walt Whitman, entitled What Is the Grass.
Doty also is the author of nine books of poetry, most recently Deep Lane, in 2015.
His book, Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems was published in 2008 and won the National Book Award for that year.
In their citation, the National Book Award judges wrote, “Elegant, plain-spoken, and unflinching, Mark Doty’s poems in Fire to Fire gently invite us to share their ferocious compassion.
“With their praise for the world and their fierce accusation, their defiance and applause, they combine grief and glory in a music of crazy excelsis.”
Doty is the first American poet to have won Great Britain’s T. S. Eliot Prize, for My Alexandria, published in 1993.
That book also received both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
His other collections of poetry include Turtle, Swan, Atlantis, Sweet Machine, Source and the critically acclaimed volume, School of the Arts.
In addition to the National Book Award, Doty has also received two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, a Lila Wallace/Readers Digest Award, and the Witter Byner Prize.
In 2011, Doty was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
He is currently a distinguished professor at Rutgers University, and also teaches in New York University’s low-residency program in Paris.
