For Immediate Release

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

David Kranes and Jeff Metcalf to read at City Art

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

Wednesday February 5th, 7:00—9:00 P.M.

 

            Fiction writers David Kranes and Jeff Metcalf will read from their works on Wednesday February 5th at the Salt Lake City Public Library at 7:00 P.M. as part of the City Art Reading Series. 

 

David Kranes is a writer of seven novels and three volumes of short stories—most recently, (novel) Making The Ghost Dance (2005) and (stories) The Legend’s Daughter (2013).  His 2001 novel, The National Tree, was made into a film by Hallmark, which aired in November 2009.  His short fiction (appearing in such magazines as Esquire, Ploughshares, Transatlantic Review) has won literary prizes and has been anthologized.  Over 40 of his plays have been performed in New York and across the U.S. (in theaters such as The Actors’ Theater of Louisville, The Mark Taper Forum, Manhattan Theater Club, Cincinnati’s Playhouse in the Park), and his Selected Plays was published in 2010.  His most recent theater venture was contributing a play to an evening (with the prompt of “bravery”) of six short plays—3 by American playwrights, 3 by Iraqi playwrights.  He has written for radio, film and for dance companies.  The opera, Orpheus Lex, for which he wrote the libretto, was performed at New York City’s Symphony Space in February of 2010.  In his second (or is it third?) life, Mr. Kranes, travels and consults in the casino industry. 

 

 

 

Jeff Metcalf is the author of Wacko’s City of Fun Carnival, Requiem for the Living, and the play A Slight Discomfort.  He is an award-winning writer and teacher, as well as the director of a nonprofit aimed to grant underserved populations access to higher education. Metcalf lives in Salt Lake City, Utah where he teaches literature and playwriting in the English Department and in the Honors College at the University of Utah. A recipient of the 2016 Taft-Nicholson Artist-in-Residence Award, 2014 Distinguished Teacher Award University of Utah, the 53rd Utah Arts Council Award for Creative non-fiction (Requiem for the Living, University of Utah Press), the 2008 Career Teaching Award from the University of Utah, the Huntsman Award for Excellence in Education, a Fulbright Memorial Scholar Award, the National Council of English Teachers Award, the Lifetime Advocacy Award from Writers @ Work, grants from both the Utah Humanities Council and the Utah Arts Council and numerous other teaching awards. His most recent work, Hope, Heart and the Humanities, a collaboration with four other professors, will be released in November by the University of Utah Press.

 

Metcalf’s play, A Slight Discomfort, about his own prostate cancer, has been continuously performed since its world premiere at the Salt Lake Acting Company in October of 2008. ‘A Slight Discomfort’ has been broadcast on National Public Radio, Radio West, and performed in Croatia, Spain, Italy, Turkey and in fifteen states. He is hard at work on a series of fly-fishing essays as well as a book on social justice in education. When he is not writing, Metcalf can be found fly-fishing the great trout waters of the West.

 

City Art is sponsored by the Utah Arts Council, Catalyst, the Salt Lake City Public Library, Xmission, and the Zoo, Arts, and Park Fund.

 

The event is free and open to the public.  City Art is sponsored by the Utah Arts Council, the Salt Lake City Arts Council, Zoo, Arts, and Parks, X-mission, and audience donations.