Peter Orner

Join us for a reading and conversation with writer Peter Orner in conversation with Steve Heilig from The New School at Commonweal (TNC). Am I Alone Here? is both a collection of essays about reading and a memoir. Dave Eggers says, “This book, thank God, defies any category. Although some will want to dive in randomly and skip around, reading these exquisite essays in order allows the book to develop a momentum and cumulative power that sneaks up on you and knocks you back.” Peter teaches at the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers as well as at San Francisco State University, where he is chair of the Creative Writing Department. He is a member of the Bolinas Volunteer Fire Department. Co-presented by the Bolinas Library, TNC, and Point Reyes Books. Light refreshments will be served.

About Peter Orner: Chicago-born Peter Orner has lived in the San Francisco Bay area for sixteen years. He is the author of two novels (The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo, 2006, Love and Shame and Love, 2010) and two story collections (Esther Stories, 2001, and Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge, 2013), as well as the editor of two oral histories (Voice of Witness). Orner’s fiction and non-fiction have appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic Monthly, Granta, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, The Southern Review, and many other publications. His stories have been anthologized in Best American Stories and twice received a Pushcart Prize. Orner has been awarded the Rome Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a two-year Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship, as well as a Fulbright to Namibia. A new book of oral history set in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, co-edited with Evan Lyon, will be published in January, 2017.