Award-winning authors to visit Big Bend Feb. 25

MOSES LAKE — Big Bend Community College will welcome award-winning authors Mary Clearman Blew and Joy Passanante to campus Feb. 25.

Blew has written or edited more than a dozen books of fiction and nonfiction. She won Pacific Northwest Booksellers Awards for her short fiction collection, Runaway, and her memoir, All but the Waltz: Essays on a Montana Family.

She also received a Western Heritage Award for her novel, Jackalope Dreams. Her most recent nonfiction book This Is Not the Ivy League: a Memoir, depicts her educational path, beginning with enrollment in a country school in Montana and culminating with her professorship in creative writing at the University of Idaho.

Blew released a novel, Ruby Dreams of Janis Joplin, last September.

Passanante is an Idaho writer and has published in three genres over the last four decades. Her collection of stories, The Art of Absence, and her novel, My Mother’s Lovers, were both finalists for several national awards.

Her essays have received awards from Shenandoah and the Magazine Association of the Southeast. She has also published a fine-press book of poems, Shining in Italy.

Passanante has received Idaho Commission on the Arts Fellowships for poetry and fiction and an Idaho Humanities Council Research Fellowship for nonfiction. For 12 years, she has served as the University of Idaho’s Associate Director of Creative Writing.

Through a Long Absence—Words from My Father’s Wars was the Silver Winner for biography in the Foreword Best of the INDIES Book of the Year Award.

Blew and Passanante will read selections from their recent work beginning at 2:30 p.m. in the Masto Conference Center (ATEC 1800 building). The reading is free and open to the public.

The visit is sponsored by the BBCC Writing Club.