For Immediate Release

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

Lance Larsen and Caren Beilin to read at City Art

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

Wednesday December 10th, 7:00—9:00 P.M.
 
           
Utah Poet Laureate Lance Larsen and fiction writer Caren Beilin will read from their works on Wednesday, December 10th at 7:00 p.m. at the Salt Lake City Public Library as part of the City Art Reading Series and the Utah Humanities Council Book Festival. This event is free and open to the public.
 
Utah Poet Laureate Lance Larsen’s fourth collection of poems, Genius Loci, was recently published by University of Tampa Press.  His earlier collections include Backyard Alchemy (2009), In All Their Animal Brilliance (2005), and Erasable Walls (1998).  He holds a PhD from the University of Houston.  His work appears widely, in such venues as Georgia Review, Southern Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, River Styx, Orion, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Best American Poetry 2009, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere.  His nonfiction has twice made the Notable Essay list in Best American Essays.  He is currently working on Seventeen Ways to Float, a collection of essays about place, family, and memory which won 1st place in the 2011 Utah Original Writing Competition.  He grew up in Idaho and Colorado and lived in Chile for two years while serving an LDS mission.  He collects antiques, plays basketball, occasionally walks on his hands, grows daylilies, hikes, and loves Indian and Thai food.  He sometimes collaborates with his wife, Jacqui Biggs Larsen, a painter and multi-media artist.  Since 1993 he has taught literature and creative writing at BYU, where he currently serves as associate chair.  He and Jacqui recently directed a study abroad program in Madrid.  In 2012, he was named to a five-year term as Utah Poet Laureate.

Caren Beilin’s book University of Pennsylvania is the Noemi Fiction Prize winner and has just been published.  Beilin grew up in Germantown, Philadelphia. Her fiction can be found in McSweeney’s, Fence, and in the DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press chapbook, Americans, Guests, or Us. The University of Pennsylvania, in its various forms, has been the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship, a finalist in Fence’s Modern Prose Prize, and winner of Noemi Press’s Book Award for Fiction.
 
City Art is Salt Lake’s longest-running reading series and provides a unique forum for the literary arts during their weekly programs on each of the first three Wednesdays of the month from September to May at the Salt Lake City Public Library.
 
City Art is sponsored by the Utah Arts Council, Catalyst, the Salt Lake City Public Library, Xmission, and the Zoo, Arts, and Park Fund.  This reading is also sponsored by the Utah Humanities Council as part of the Utah Humanities Book Festival. 
 
 
 
Joel Long