Writing Series welcomes author Deborah Willis 

The 20-year anniversary season of the University of Maine New Writing Series continues with a free, public reading by award-winning Canadian fiction writer Deborah Willis at 4:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 13, in the Allen and Sally Fernald APPE Space (Room 104) in Stewart Commons.

Hollie Adams, assistant professor in the Department of English, will introduce and host the Q&A to follow.

Deborah Willis’s first collection of short fiction, Vanishing and Other Stories, was named one of The Globe and Mail’s Best Books of 2009, was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award, and was praised by Nobel-prize winner Alice Munro, who wrote that “The emotional range and depth of these stories, their clarity and deftness, is astonishing.” 

Willis’s second collection, The Dark and Other Love Stories, was long-listed for the 2017 Giller Prize, won the Georges Bugnet Award, and was named one of the best books of the year by The Globe and Mail, the CBC, NPR, and Chatelaine Magazine. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Iowa Review, The Walrus, The Virginia Quarterly, Lucky Peach, and Zoetrope.

The University of Maine New Writing Series was founded in 1999 and is sponsored by the UMaine Department of English and the Center for Poetry and Poetics (formerly the National Poetry Foundation), with support from the Eaton Family New Writing Series Fund, the Lloyd H. Elliott Fund, the Milton Ellis Memorial Fund, the Honors College, and the Cultural Affairs/ Distinguished Lecture Series Committee. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Innovative Media, Research & Commercialization Center (IMRC), and to donors Allen and Sally Fernald, for use of the Fernald APPE space.

For more information, contact Steven Evans, 207.581.3822