The Living Writers Reading Series presents Peter Orner. Peter Orner is a human rights lawyer, and editor and writer of novels and short stories. His works include: Esther Stories, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo, Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives, and the soon-to-be-released Love and Shame and Love: A Novel. Orner has been awarded several honors including the Guggenheim Fellowship, Lannan Literary Fellowship, and the Bard Fiction Prize.

Orner has published fiction in the Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, The Southern Review, and various other publications. Stories have been anthologized in Best American Stories and twice won a Pushcart Prize (Best of the Small Presses). Orner was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (2006), as well as the two-year Lannan Foundation Fellowship (2007). A film version of one of Orner’s stories, “The Raft” with a screenplay by Orner and the film’s director, Rob Jones, is currently in production and stars Ed Asner.

Orner has taught at the University of Montana, Bard College, Charles University in Prague, Washington University, and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Orner is a long time permanent faculty member at San Francisco State where he is an associate professor. He is a currently visiting fiction faculty at the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa.

For more information about the event, please contact Micah Perks by email at meperks@ucsc.edu. Books will be available for sale at the talk, courtesy of the Bay Tree Bookstore.

The Fall 2011 Living Writers Reading Series is sponsored by the Puknat Literary Fund, the Porter Hitchcock Fund, the UCSC Literature Department, and the Sain Endowment.