Paul Collins and Ted Van Alst

PSU’s Creative Writing Program presents a reading with Paul Collins and Ted Van Alst!

Paul Collins is a writer specializing in history, memoir, and unusual antiquarian literature. His nine books have been translated into eleven languages, and include Not Even Wrong: A Father’s Journey Into the Lost History of Autism (2004), and The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City & Sparked the Tabloid Wars (2011).  He is a 2009 recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Nonfiction. Collins’s recent freelance work includes pieces for the New Yorker, Lapham’s Quarterly, and New Scientist. In addition to appearing on NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday as its “literary detective” on odd and forgotten old books, he is also the founding editor of the Collins Library imprint of McSweeney’s Books, where he has revived such disparate works as a World War I internment camp memoir and an absurdist 1934 detective tale. Collins is Professor and Chair of English at Portland State University.

Dr. Theodore “Ted” C. Van Alst, Jr. is Associate Professor and Director of Indigenous Nations Studies at Portland State University. He is co-editor and Creative Editor for Transmotion, a journal of postmodern indigenous studies. His short story collection about growing up in Chicago, Sacred Smokes, was published in August 2018 by the University of New Mexico Press, who also published his edited volume The Faster Redder Road: The Best UnAmerican Stories of Stephen Graham Jones. Van Alst’s work appears in collections such as Seeing Red, Visualities, and The Routledge Companion to Native American Literature. His fiction, essays, and photography have been published widely.

The reading will be held in Smith Memorial Student Union, Room 238