Maintained by pioweb@ucsc.edu
© 2008 The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.

May 8, 2007

Author James D. Houston to give reading at UC Santa Cruz on May 22

By Scott Rappaport (831) 459-2496; srapp@ucsc.edu

The UC Santa Cruz Humanities Division and Bay Tree Bookstore will present a reading and book signing by local author and former UCSC lecturer, James D. Houston, on Tuesday, May 22, at 7:30 p.m. in the Humanities Lecture Hall. Admission is free and the public is invited.

Houston is the author of eight novels, including the critically acclaimed Snow Mountain Passage and Continental Drift. He will read from his latest work, Bird of Another Heaven, which was just published by Alfred Knopf in March. The historical novel is set against the dual backdrop of California during the Gold Rush and Hawaii on the verge of annexation as a U.S. territory.

Houston’s nonfiction works include Californians; In the Ring of Fire: A Pacific Basin Journey; and Farewell to Manzanar, which he coauthored with his wife, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston. The latter--a true account of her family's experience during and after the World War II internment--is in its 67th printing and has become a standard work in schools and colleges across the country.

Houston received an M.A. in American literature from Stanford University, where he studied with Wallace Stegner, critic Irving Howe, editor Malcolm Cowley, and the Irish short story master Frank O'Connor. He returned to Stanford as a Stegner Writing Fellow four years later and during that time sold his first novel, Between Battles, and completed his second, Gig, which was honored with the Joseph Henry Jackson Award for Fiction.

A resident of Santa Cruz since 1962, Houston made his living for several years as a musician, teaching classical and folk guitar, and playing acoustic bass in a piano bar, as well as in a bluegrass band. He began teaching writing part-time at UC Santa Cruz in 1962, and was employed as a lecturer on campus for more than two decades. In 2006, Houston returned to his alma mater, San Jose State University, as a distinguished visiting professor in creative writing.

Houston’s stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times, New Yorker, Rolling Stone, GQ, Ploughshares, The Utne Reader, Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine, Manoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing, and Zyzzyva.

For more information, call (831) 459-5742.

#####