The Program in Creative Writing is pleased to announce a reading featuring Prof. Leni Zumas with PCC Carolyn Moore Writers-in-Residence Justin Boening and Devon Walker-Figueroa. This event is free and open to the public. Please note that masks are required by the IPRC.
Justin Boening is the author of Not on the Last Day, but on the Very Last, a winner of the 2015 National Poetry Series, as well as Self-Portrait as Missing Person, which was awarded a Poetry Society of America National Chapbook Fellowship. He is a recipient of the “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize, a work-study scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, a Stadler Fellowship from Bucknell University, and a Henry David Thoreau Fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center. His poetry and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in publications such as Denver Quarterly, Kenyon Review Online, Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, Narrative, and TYPO, among others. A graduate of Columbia University’s School of the Arts, Boening is currently a senior editor at Poetry Northwest, and is cofounding editor at Horsethief Books.
Devon Walker-Figueroa is the author of Philomath, selected for the 2020 National Poetry Series by Sally Keith, shortlisted for the 2021 National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, and awarded the 2022 Levis Reading Prize. She grew up in Kings Valley, a ghost town in the Oregon Coast Range, and received her education from Cornell University; Bennington College; the Iowa Writers’ Workshop; and New York University, where she was the Jill Davis Fellow. Her writing has appeared in The Nation, POETRY, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Zyzzyva, and elsewhere.
Leni Zumas is the author of three books of fiction, including the bestselling novel Red Clocks, which won the 2019 Oregon Book Award for Fiction. The novel was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and was named a Best Book of 2018 by The Atlantic, the Washington Post, the Huffington Post, Entropy, and the New York Public Library. Her fourth book, Wolf Bells, is forthcoming from Algonquin. A finalist for the 2021 John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, Zumas is also the author of Farewell Navigator: Stories (2008) and the novel The Listeners (2012). Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in the New York Times, The Times Literary Supplement, Granta, Guernica, The Cut, Tin House, and elsewhere. She is a professor in the creative writing program at Portland State University.