Upcoming Speakers

Cheryl Strayed

At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother's death, her family scattered and her own marriage was soon destroyed. Four years later, with nothing more to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life. With no experience or training, driven only by blind will, she would hike more than a thousand miles of the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State and she would do it alone. Told with suspense and style, sparkling with warmth and humor, Wild powerfully captures the terrors and pleasures of one young woman forging ahead against all odds on a journey that maddened, strengthened, and ultimately healed her.

Cheryl Strayed is the author of the New York Times bestseller Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, which was made into an Oscar-nominated film. Her bestselling collection of Dear Sugar columns, Tiny Beautiful Things, was adapted for a Hulu television show and as a play that continues to be staged in theaters nationwide. Strayed's other books are the critically acclaimed novel, Torch, and the bestselling collection Brave Enough, which brings together more than one hundred of her inspiring quotes. Her books have sold more than 5 million copies around the world and have been translated into forty languages. Strayed’s award-winning essays and short stories have been published in The Best American Essays, the New York Times, the Washington Post Magazine, Vogue, and elsewhere. She has also made two hit podcasts, Dear Sugars, which she co-hosted with Steve Almond, and Sugar Calling. Cheryl Strayed lives in Portland, Oregon.

The Clark Library has put together a helpful reading guide for the book and author.

 For questions contact English Professor Lars Erik Larson.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

UP welcomed Viet Thanh Nguyen to campus as our Fall Schoenfeldt Distinguished Writer on Wednesday, October 23. A recording of the event can be accessed here.

Viet Thanh Nguyen is one of America’s most important fiction writer/memoirists. His novel The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and he earned the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Edgar Award for Best First Novel, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, the First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction, a Gold Medal in First Fiction from the California Book Awards, and the Asian/Pacific American Literature Award. His other books are his memoir A Man of Two Faces, the short-story collection The Refugees, The Committed (the sequel to The Sympathizer), National Book Award finalist Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War and Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America. He is a Professor at the University of Southern California, and has been the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations. Nguyen is the editor of The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives and the Library of America volume for Maxine Hong Kingston. This year HBO turned The Sympathizer into a TV series directed by Park Chan-wook. Nguyen’s last book was Simone, a children’s book illustrated by Minnie Phan, while his next book is To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other, forthcoming in 2025. https://vietnguyen.info/

 For questions contact English Professor Lars Erik Larson.