News Article

Katrina Roberts. Photo by Mary Randlett.

Katrina Roberts, a Harvard-educated poet and English professor at Whitman College in Walla Walla, will read from her works at 7:30 p.m., today (Monday, Oct. 12), in Gonzaga University’s Cataldo Hall Globe Room. The event, which is free and open to the public, is the second in the 2009-2010 Gonzaga University Visiting Writers Series.

Roberts has authored three books of poetry, most recently “Friendly Fire,” and is an English professor at Whitman College. The reading series is sponsored by Gonzaga University and a grant from Humanities Washington. Cataldo Hall is located 50 yards due north from St. Aloysius Church.

A graduate of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Roberts is a Paul Garrett Fellow and the Mina Schwabacher Associate Professor of English and the Humanities at Whitman College, where she directs the Visiting Writers Reading Series.

Born on the Jersey shore and raised mostly in small towns along the New England coast, Roberts spent the year after college writing on a Briggs Literary Traveling Fellowship, and learning the ways of wine-making in Switzerland and France. She had the chance to work with Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney at the time as well.

Roberts moved to the Pacific Northwest to teach at Whitman College and grow grapes, following a decade of teaching as an adjunct professor in Cambridge, Mass., (at Harvard Extension, Boston University, College of the Holy Cross, Keene State College, University of Southern Maine, Bard College Institute for Writing and Thinking, etc.).

She and husband Jeremy Barker, an artist and distiller native to Walla Walla, are proprietors of and winemakers for Tytonidae Cellars, which they started in 2003. They can usually find their three small children playing with barn cats in the good dirt somewhere not far from the vineyard.

The first reading in the 2009-2010 Gonzaga University Visiting Writers Series was held Sept. 22 also on the GU campus and featured National Book Award Winner Denis (spelling is correct) Johnson, a novelist, who read from his works.

The Gonzaga University Visiting Writers Series, initiated and spearheaded by Tod Marshall, an associate professor of English at Gonzaga, offers lectures/readings at Gonzaga throughout the academic year by prominent writers who express diverse perspectives. The series received a $5,000 grant from Humanities Washington to fund appearances by writers of regional and national importance.

Following is the remaining schedule for the Gonzaga University Visiting Writers Series. All lectures in the series are free and open to the public and all begin at 7:30 p.m., in the Cataldo Hall Globe Room.

• Natasha Trethewey, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Nov 9;
• Sharon Olds, an outstanding poet, Feb 2, 2010;
• Richard Kenney, a poet and MacArthur Fellow who teaches at University of Washington, March 1, 2010; 
• Tod Marshall, the series organizer, a poet and GU English professor, April 13, 2010.

For more information, contact Gonzaga English Associate Professor Tod Marshall at (509) 313-6681 or via e-mail.