PORT TOWNSEND — Free public readings by such authors as Luis Alberto Urrea, Gary Copeland Lilley, Skip Horack, Pam Houston, Claire Davis and Joseph Stroud will begin tonight.
Jimmy Kimbrell, Wendy Call, Kim Addonizio, Melissa Febos and Erin Belieu also will read selections from their work during the week of evening readings.
The 11 authors are faculty members at Centrum’s Port Townsend Writers’ Conference, which began Thursday and will continue through next Sunday, July 19.
Also featured this week will be participants in the conference.
Faculty members will read at the Joseph F. Wheeler Theater at Fort Worden State Park.
Participants in the workshop will read selections Wednesday at 7 p.m. at the Northwind Arts Center, 701 Water St.
During the writers’ conference, now in its 42nd year, emerging and established writers participate in workshops, lectures and readings over two weeks.
Public readings
Here is the schedule of public readings:
■ Tonight, 7:15 p.m., Wheeler Theater — Lilley and Kimbrell.
■ Monday, 7 p.m., Wheeler Theater — Call and Houston.
■ Tuesday, 7 p.m., Wheeler Theater — Davis and Addonizio.
■ Wednesday, 7 p.m., Northwind Arts Center — Participant reading.
■ Thursday, 7 p.m., Wheeler Theater — Horack and Urrea.
■ Friday, 7 p.m., Wheeler Theater — Febos and Belieu.
■ Saturday, 7 p.m., Wheeler Theater — “An Evening with Joseph Stroud.”
Urrea is the 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist for nonfiction, a member of the Latino Literature Hall of Fame and the author of 16 books, including The Devil’s Highway, The Hummingbird’s Daughter, Into the Beautiful North and The Tijuana Book of the Dead.
Belieu, the artistic director of the conference, is the author of Slant Six, Infanta and Black Box.
Addonizio, a blues poet, wrote Jimmy & Rita and What Is This Thing Called Love.
Lilley and Call are Copper Canyon Press poets. Lilley authored Alpha Zulu and The Subsequent Blues.
Call is the 2015 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow and winner of the Grub Street National Book Prize for Nonfiction. She wrote No Word for Welcome: The Mexican Village Faces the Global Economy.
Stroud is the author of five books of poetry: In the Sleep of Rivers, Signatures, Below Cold Mountai, Country of Light and Of This World, New & Selected Poems.
Other writers
Kimbrell wrote The Gatehouse Heaven, which was chosen by poet Charles Wright for the Kathryn A. Morton Prize from Sarabande Books, and My Psychic.
Horack, author of The Southern Cross, The Eden Hunter and The Other Joseph, is the winner of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference 2008 Bakeless Fiction Prize.
Houston authored Cowboys Are My Weakness, Waltzing the Cat, Sight Hound and Contents May Have Shifted. Her stories have been selected for the Best American Short Stories, the O. Henry Awards, the Pushcart Prize and the Best American Short Stories of the Century.
Davis, author of Winter Range, is the winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award and the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award for Fiction in 2001.
For more information, visit www.centrum.org or call 360-385-3102.
