Poet and novelist Joe Wilkins, whose 2019 novel “Fall Back Down When I Die” earned a litany of awards, will present this year’s Stegner Lecture on March 11 at the Lewis-Clark State College Center for Arts & History.
Wilkins will discuss “Language, Memory and Story” at 7 p.m. at the center, 415 Main St. in Lewiston.
He is director of the creative writing program at Linfield University in McMinnville, Ore., and serves on the faculty of Eastern Oregon University’s low-residency Master of Fine Arts program, according to an LCSC news release.
“Fall Back Down When I Die” earned the Pacific Northwest Book Award and the 2020 High Plains Book Award and made the short list for the First Novel Award from the Center for Fiction.
Wilkins’ memoir “The Mountain and the Fathers” was a finalist for the Orion Book Award and won the Great Lakes Colleges Association’s Emerging Writers Award. He has published four poetry collections, including “When We Were Birds,” which won the Oregon Book Award, and “Thieve,” a finalist for the same award.
He also earned the Pushcart Prize, which honors the best poetry, short fiction, essays and literary pieces published by small presses each year.
Wilkins was born and raised on a sheep and hay ranch north of the Bull Mountains in eastern Montana. He graduated from Gonzaga University with a degree in engineering and earned a master’s degree in creative writing from the University of Idaho, where he worked with former LCSC professor and poet Robert Wrigley and novelist and LCSC alumna Kim Barnes.
The now-annual Stegner Lecture began with Wallace Stegner in 1982. Stegner, often called “The Dean of Western Writers,” won a Pulitzer Prize in 1972.
The college’s COVID-19 protocols can be found at lcsc.edu/coronavirus/guides-resources.