Fiction writer Rebecca Brown and poet Ilya Kaminsky will read from their work on Friday, November 8, at 7:30 pm at Fort Worden State Park’s Building 262. The reading is free.

Rebecca’ Brown’s latest book, American Romances (City Lights 2010), is a collection of gonzo essays that put Brian Wilson (of the Beach Boys) and Hawthorne on the same page and reveals the secret sex life of H. G. Wells’ The Invisible Man. It won the Publishing Triangle’s Judy Grahn award for nonfiction in 2010. Much of the book was written in-residence at Centrum.

Brown’s previous books with City Lights include The Last Time I Saw You (2005) and The End of Youth, (2003). Her book Excerpts From A Family Medical Dictionary (Granta, UK and University of Wisconsin Press, USA) was published in February of 2004. She is also the author of The Gifts of the Body, The Terrible Girls, Annie Oakley’s Girl, The Haunted House, The Children’s Crusade, and What Keeps Me Here.

Rebecca’s work has been awarded the Boston Book Review Award for fiction, The Lambda Literary Award, The Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award, and a Washington State Governor’s Award and a Stranger Genius Award.

Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa, former Soviet Union in 1977, and arrived in the United States in 1993, when his family was granted asylum by the American government. He is the author of Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004) which won the Whiting Writer’s Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award, the Dorset Prize, the Ruth Lilly Fellowship given annually by Poetry magazine. Dancing In Odessa was also named Best Poetry Book of the Year 2004 by ForeWord Magazine. In 2008, Kaminsky was awarded Lannan Foundation’s Literary Fellowship.

This reading is the public capstone of Centrum’s Autumn Writers’ Intensive—a weekend writing workshop in both experimental prose forms and poetry.