Red Hen Press Turns 17
Ron Carlson, winner of the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, Pulitzer-prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey, and New York Times bestselling novelist and PEN/Faulkner Prize winner T.C. Boyle will join Red Hen Press for its 17thAnniversary Champagne Luncheon at the Westin Pasadena on Sunday, November 6 at 11:00 a.m.
Since 1994, Red Hen Press has worked to publish over 250 works of literary excellence, to foster diversity, and to promote literacy in our local schools, seeking a community of readers and writers who are actively engaged in the essential human practice known as literature. After seventeen years of being Southern California’s premier independent publisher of poetry and literary fiction, Red Hen Press will celebrate with a spectacular event featuring conversations with local literary celebrities, a deluxe luncheon, the conferring of three awards, a raffle, a silent auction, and readings by three highly esteemed authors:
Ron Carlson is the author of nine books of fiction, most recently The Signal: A Novel (2009). His short stories have appeared in Esquire,Harper’s, The New Yorker, The Best American Short Stories, The O’Henry Prize Series, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, and dozens of other journals and anthologies. He is the co-director of the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at the University of California, Irvine. Among his awards are the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, Ploughshares’ Cohen Prize, and a National Society of Arts and Letters Literature Award.
Natasha Trethewey is the author of three collections of poetry: Domestic Work (2000), Bellocq’s Ophelia (2002), and Native Guard (2006), for which she was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize. Her first poetry collection won the inaugural 1999 Cave Canem poetry prize and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry. Her second collection was named a 2003 Notable Book by the American Library Association. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
T.C. Boyle is the author of twenty-two books of fiction, including, most recently, Wild Child (2010) and When the Killing’s Done (2011). He has been a member of the English Department at the University of Southern California since 1978, where he is Distinguished Professor of English. His stories have appeared in magazines including The New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review,and McSweeney’s, and he has been the recipient of a number of literary awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Prize for best novel of the year (World’s End, 1988); the PEN/Malamud Prize in the short story (T.C. Boyle Stories, 1999); and the Prix Médicis Étranger for best foreign novel in France (The Tortilla Curtain, 1997).
Other guests include Alice Quinn, Danzy Senna, Percival Everett, Helena Maria Viramontes, Juan Felipe Herrera, Charles Harper Webb, Aimee Liu, Judith Freeman,and Pasadena Mayor Bill Bogaard.
Proceeds from this event will not only help Red Hen continue its tradition of literary achievement, it will also benefit Red Hen’s Writing in the Schools program, a literacy initiative for underprivileged K-12 students that has provided writing workshops throughout Los Angeles County since 2003. The event will feature poetry readings from participating WIS students at Cleveland Elementary School in Pasadena.
Tables are available for $1,000 and up; individual tickets are $110. For more information, please contact the press at anniversary@redhen.org.
