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Joe Wilkins

Language, Memory, and Story: From the poem to the novel

Saturday, February 22, 2025; 1pm; 5 - 7pm

Workshop, Reading and Q&A

Joe Wilkins is the author of a novel, Fall Back Down When I Die, praised as “remarkable and unforgettable” in a starred review at Booklist. Short-listed for the First Novel Prize from the Center For Fiction and the Pacific Northwest Book Award. Fall Back Down When I Die won the 2020 High Plains Book Award and has now been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, and German. Wilkins’s memoir, The Mountain and the Fathers, was a finalist for the Orion Book Award and won the GLCA Emerging Writers Award, an honor that has previously recognized early work by Alice Munro, Richard Ford, and Louise Erdrich. His second novel, The Entire Sky, is slated for publication in July 2024 with Little, Brown.

Wilkins is also the author of four poetry collections, most recently Thieve, a finalist for the Oregon Book Award, and When We Were Birds, winner of the Oregon Book Award. His poems, essays, and stories have appeared in a host of venues, including The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, Orion, Copper Nickel, Ecotone, The Sun, and High Country News, and his work has won the Pushcart Prize, earned multiple notable mentions in the Best American series, and been widely anthologized. Wilkins is the winner of a 2024 Oregon Career Literary Fellowship and has received grants from the Richard J. Margolis Award, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and PEN Northwest; as the recipient of the Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency, Wilkins and his family spent the summer and fall of 2015 living in a remote cabin in the Klamath Mountains along the Rogue River in southwest Oregon.

Wilkins was born and raised on a sheep and hay ranch north of the Bull Mountains of eastern Montana. After graduating from Gonzaga University with a degree in engineering, Wilkins spent two years teaching ninth grade pre-algebra in the Mississippi Delta with Teach For America. He then went on to earn his MFA in creative writing from the University of Idaho, where he worked with the poet Robert Wrigley and the memoirist Kim Barnes.

Wilkins serves on the faculty of Eastern Oregon University’s Low Residency MFA Program, and he has taught at a number of festivals and workshops, including the Breadloaf Environmental Writers’ Workshop, Fishtrap, the Kachemack Bay Writers Conference, and Orion in the Wilderness.

He lives with his family in the foothills of the Coast Range of western Oregon, where he directs the creative program at Linfield University.

Saturday, February 22

Workshop at 1pm

Art Bar Open at 5pm
Literary Reading and Q&A at 5:30pm

Tickets
Free to the Public

Oats Park Art Center
151 East Park Street · Fallon, Nev. 89406
Get Directions

For More Information
Call 775-423-1440

Artist’s Website
www.JoeWilkins.org.com

National Endowment for the Arts City of Fallon Nevada Arts Council Fallon Convention and Tourism Authority WESTAF

Nevada Humanities Robert Z. Hawkins Foundation Nevada Division of Tourism Lahontan Valley News The Fallon Post Great Basin Brewing Company

Thank You Sponsors & Partners

Churchill Arts Council programs and activities are sponsored, in part, by: an American Rescue Plan Act grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to support general operating expenses in response to the COVID-19 pandemic; the City of Fallon; the Nevada Arts Council; the Fallon Convention & Tourism Authority; TourWest / WESTAF; Nevada Humanities; the Depot Casino / Widmer & Mills, CPAs; Mackedon deBraga Law, P. C.; the Bretzlaff Foundation; the E. L. Cord Foundation; the Robert Z. Hawkins Foundation; Churchill County; the Nevada Commission on Tourism; Speedway Market; Lahontan Valley News; the Fallon Post; CC Communications; and Holiday Inn Express.

The free performances by Blair Crimmins & the Hookers and William Elliot Whitmore are presented in cooperation with the Mayor, City Council, and City of Fallon.

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