John Keeble to Read Tonight

John Keeble is the author of four novels and the nonfiction book Out of the Channel: The Exxon Valdez Oil Spill in Prince William Sound. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pulitzer nomination for his Village Voice piece "Black Spring in Valdez," and an Emmy nomination for To Write and Keep Kind, a documentary film on the life of Raymond Carver. His short stories, interviews, and essays on political and ecological topics have appeared in a variety of anthologies and periodicals, including Outside, Left Bank, Story, and Prairie Schooner.

John's novel Yellowfish was reissued in a new edition by the University of Washington Press in 2008, and his novel Broken Ground has just been reissued as well. Tonight he joins us at Broadway Books to read from Broken Ground.

Set in the high desert of eastern Oregon in the 1980s, the novel uses the construction of a "prison for profit," in which alien captives are incarcerated in secret, as the basis for a story with deep political, mystical, and -- for its time -- prescient implications: the impingement of American imperalism on its own native territory.  Lynn Sharon Schwartz called the book "a social fable for our time," and Barry Lopez described it as "deftly evoked" and "consistently engaging."

Educated at the University of Redlands, University of Iowa, and Brown University, John has taught at Grinnell College and Eastern Washington University, where he founded the Master of Fine Arts Program and is now Professor Emeritus. He has been a Distinguished Visiting Writer at Boise State University and on three occasions held the Coal Royalty Trust Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Alabama. He now works with long-distance Master of Fine Arts students as an associate faculty member at the University of Alaska-Anchorage.

He was born in Winnipeg, Canada, and raised in Saskatchewan and California. For thirty years he has lived with his family in rural Eastern Washington, where he and his wife raise hay, free range chickens, and organic grass fed beef cattle.

John read at Broadway Books when Yellowfish was reissued, and we're thrilled to welcome him back to the store. We hope you can join us tonight at 7 pm!