Douglas Bauer and Deirdre McNamer

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC VIRTUALLY | Deidre McNamer and Doug Bauer will read as part of the Writers Reading series. 

Deidre McNamer is the author of five novels: Rima in the Weeds (HarperCollins, 1991), One Sweet Quarrel (HarperCollins, 1994), My Russian (Houghton Mifflin, 1999), and Red Rover (Viking, 2007), which was named to the Best Books of 2007 lists of Artforum, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. It also won that year’s Montana Book Award. Her most recent novel is Aviary. Her essays, short fiction, and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, and Outside, among other venues.

She has taught writing at Cornell University, Williams College, the University of Ohio, the University of Oregon, the University of Alabama, and the University of Montana, where she has been, since 1998, a core faculty member of the MFA program. She is a recipient of a 2015 Artist’s Innovation Award from the Montana Arts Council. She chaired the fiction panel of the National Book Awards in 2011 and was a judge for the 2015 PEN/Faulkner award.

Doug Bauer’s novels are The Book of Famous Iowans; The Very Air; and Dexterity. His latest novel, The Beckoning World, was published in November. He has also published three works of nonfiction: Prairie City, Iowa; The Stuff of Fiction; and What Happens Next?: Matters of Life and Death, which won the 2014 PEN/New England Book Award in Nonfiction. He’s edited the anthologies Prime Times: Writers on Television and Death by Pad Thai and Other Unforgettable Meals. He has received fellowships in both fiction and creative nonfiction from the National Endowment for the Arts. He holds a Doctor of Arts from the State University of New York at Albany and a BA in journalism from Drake University. He has taught, among other places, at Harvard, Rice University, and Smith College. Bauer was an undergraduate faculty member at Bennington from Fall 2005-Spring 2015 and has been teaching in the Bennington Writing Seminars since January 2007.