Featuring award-winning author Sigrid Nunez & Sheridan’s Darla Worden
Darla Worden (left) will read from her upcoming Hemingway book at the Sheridan Inn (center) with Sigrid Nunez (right), an award-winning author and Ucross Fellow.
Ucross, Wyoming – August 1, 2018 – Award-winning author and Ucross writer-in-residence Sigrid Nunez will join editor and writer Darla Worden at The Sheridan Inn on Thursday, August 30, at 6:30 p.m. for a reading that celebrates the literary legacy of Ernest Hemingway in Wyoming. The reading, co-hosted by Ucross and Sheridan College, is open to the public at no charge. The emcee for the evening will be writer and Ucross trustee Dorie McCullough Lawson. A book signing and refreshments will follow the reading.
The event is the third event this year in “Explore Hemingway: Along Wyoming Highways,” a statewide, multi-year initiative celebrating the life and writing of Ernest Hemingway and exploring related historical and contemporary issues.
Hemingway loved Wyoming and spent time hunting, fishing, and writing throughout the state. The author stayed at the Sheridan Inn while writing A Farewell to Arms, but the busy social life in Sheridan made it hard to work, so he decamped to Spear-O-Wigwam in the Bighorn Mountains to continue writing.
A former Sheridan resident and a graduate of Sheridan High School, Darla Worden currently lives in Denver, where she is editor of Mountain Living magazine. She has published articles on Hemingway’s Wyoming connection and has been interviewed about the subject on Wyoming Public Radio. She is the founder of the Left Bank Writers Retreat in Paris, an annual summer writing workshop and literary tourism experience. For the workshop, Worden takes writers from around the world to Hemingway’s favorite Paris spots.
L to R: Ernest Hemingway at work; the Ucross Foundation; The Friend by Sigrid Nunez.
Sigrid Nunez first came to Ucross as a writer-in-residence in 1997, when her novel, A Feather on the Breath of God, was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction. She has written six additional novels. Ucross has partnered with the PEN/Hemingway Award – founded by Mary Hemingway, wife of Ernest Hemingway – since 1995, and invites the award winner, two finalists and two honorable mentions for one-month residencies at Ucross. The award is administered by PEN America.
Nunez is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag and she has contributed to publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Paris Review. Her other honors include a Whiting Writer’s Award, a Berlin Prize Fellowship, and two awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A resident of New York City, she has taught at universities including Columbia and Princeton and in spring 2019, she will be visiting writer at Syracuse University. She has also served on the faculty of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.
The “Explore Hemingway” series – including the Worden and Nunez reading – is sponsored by a National Endowment for the Humanities Grant: “Creating Humanities Communities along Wyoming’s Hemingway Highway,” which was received by Sheridan College in partnership with the Wyoming Humanities Council, Wyoming Institute for Humanities Research, and Ucross.
“It’s so exciting that these Wyoming organizations collaborated on an NEH grant to weave Hemingway’s writing throughout this state he loved, while providing a variety of connections for residents to the previously little-known story of his time here,” says Worden. She notes that the grant’s 2018 timing coincides with the 90th anniversary of Hemingway finishing his Wyoming draft of A Farewell to Arms in 1928.
At the August 30th event, Nunez will read from her most recent novel The Friend, published this year. Worden will read from her forthcoming book, The Dignity of the Iceberg: One Woman’s Wyoming-to-Paris Search for Hemingway, about her experience of following in the famous author’s footsteps through Paris only to discover the importance of Sheridan and her home state in his work.
The first two “Explore Hemingway” author events took place with PEN/Hemingway Award winners Yaa Gyasi and Kevin Powers. Future “Explore Hemingway” events include an exhibition reception on Sept. 7, 2018, for Hemingway and the Comics at Neltje Gallery at Sheridan College from 4-6 p.m., with a presentation by Hemingway scholar Robert Elder at 6. Elder will give another presentation Sept. 8 at the Hub on Smith Street on Hemingway’s high school crush.
The public opening of events for the NEH Hemingway Highway grant will take place Sept. 14-15, 2018. Opening events include the performance of Carol Hemingway’s play, “Hemingway on Stage”; a fundraiser at the Sheridan Inn featuring Phil Greene, author of To Have and Have Another: A Hemingway Cocktail Companion; and a Hemingway-themed Saturday U at Sheridan College. A full schedule is online at www.sheridan.edu/business-community/conference-camps/conference-events/hemingways-wyoming/.
For more information contact Carly Fraysier, Ucross, cfraysier@ucross.org, 307.737.2291