UCA FACULTY MEMBER SPITZER TO READ FROM BOHEMIAN MEMOIR SERIES
UCA FACULTY MEMBER SPITZER TO READ
FROM BOHEMIAN MEMOIR SERIES
By Jerry Stewart
UCA Department of Writing
CONWAY — Mark Spitzer, assistant professor of writing at the University of Central Arkansas, will read from the latest installment of his wild bohemian memoir, After the Orange Glow, at the Faulkner County Library on Thursday, March 31 at 7 p.m.
The event is free and open to the public.
This book was just published by Monkey Puzzle Press in Boulder, Colo., and is the fifth book Spitzer has published in one year.
In his memoir, Spitzer recounts the spontaneous, passionate, raucous, and sometimes ludicrous lifestyle of expat poets and writers living and working in a legendary Paris bookstore. He portrays a behind-the-scenes look at his life and those of the Beat poets who shaped the literary style of a generation.
“Mark Spitzer has written a humping, yowling, spewing, brow-beating memoir about his . . . crackling youth spent in Paris at George Whitman’s Shakespeare & Co., an historic and histrionic wacky crash-pad bookstore,” said Elva Maxine Beach, author of Neurotica.
Spitzer teaches creative writing in the Department of Writing at UCA and is the editor in chief of the Toad Suck Review literary journal when he’s not out promoting the conservation of the misunderstood garfish.
“[He] is a great writer . . . what he gets down on the page is his own vision, a vision filled with energy, movement, humor, and surprise,” said David Gessner, author of Sick of Nature.
Louis Alberto Urrea, author of Into the Beautiful North, added, “You will not find another like him . . . he is the most dedicated writer I know.”
After the Orange Glow is the first in a series of four memoirs that are being published out of sequence. The third in the series, Writer in Residence (University of New Orleans Press) was published last year, and Spitzer read from it as well at the Faulkner County Library.
“He is funny and hilarious,” said Jeanetta Darley, events programmer at the library. “It was entertaining. Mark is always a great reader.”
After the reading, there will be a question and answer session followed by a book signing. Copies of After the Orange Glow will be available for purchase.
The Faulkner County Library is located at 1900 Tyler Street in Conway, Arkansas. For more information, contact Darley at (501) 327-7482 or jeanetta@fcl.org.
Prof. Mark Spitzer
Department of Writing
University of Central Arkansas
Conway, AR 72035
www.sptzr.net
www.sptzr.net
