LEWISTON, Idaho – Writer and natural history expert Elizabeth Bradfield will be the guest speaker virtually at the 38th annual Lewis-Clark State College Stegner Lecture on Nov. 13 at 7 p.m.
Bradfield was originally scheduled to be the speaker for the event earlier this year on March 20 in Lewiston but it had to be postponed because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Bradfield will discuss “Decolonizing the Exploration Narrative” on the LCSC Humanities Division YouTube channel. Her talk, which is sponsored by the college’s Humanities Division, is free and open to the public.
Bradfield will talk about how narratives of exploration have been a part of American literature from the outset, but are also inherently problematic. She will also read from her book Toward Antarctica, which takes an intimate look at the continent.
The Stegner Lecture is named after Wallace Stegner and has been a literary-cultural highlight since Stegner gave the first lecture in 1982. Stegner has often been called “The Dean of Western Writers” and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1972. The annual lecture at LC State features discussions about the writer’s relationship with the physical and psychological territories in which he or she resides.
Bradfield’s poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, West Branch, Poetry, The Atlantic Monthly and Orion among other publications. She is the author of Once Removed, Approaching Ice, Interpretive Work, and Theorem, the latter a collaborative work with artist Antonia Contro.
Bradfield won the Audre Lorde Prize from Publishing Triangle and was a finalist for both a Lambda Literary Award and the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. She also has received a Stegner Fellowship and a Bread Loaf Scholarship, and has been a resident scholar at the Vermont Studio Center.
Bradfield has spent the last 20 years as a naturalist and guide on ships both in the Puget Sound and Cape Cod areas and in remote places around the world.
She grew up in Tacoma and graduated from the University of Washington, and later earned her master’s from the University of Alaska at Anchorage. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of Broadsided Press and a contributing editor to the Alaska Quarterly Review. She also is an associate professor and co-director of creative writing at Brandeis University near Boston.
For more information on the event, contact the LC State Humanities Division at [email protected] or 208-792-2297.