'Glorybound' Author to Read Her Works

Jessie van Eerden, a distinguished fiction writer and essayist, will read from her recently published novel “Glorybound” and other new works on Thursday, Oct. 23, at 7:30 p.m. in Hieronymus Lounge at Westmont’s Kerrwood Hall. The Westmont Reading Series, which is co-sponsored by the Westmont English Department and the Gaede Institute for the Liberal Arts, is free and open to the public.

Van Eerden, director of the low-residency Master of Fine Arts writing program at West Virginia Wesleyan College, has contributed essays to several anthologies and had her work published in numerous journals and magazines.

“‘Glorybound’ is both the title of her new novel and a description of her apparent career trajectory,” says Randall VanderMey, Westmont professor of English. “The reading series adds this fresh, poetic, spiritually intense and regionally rich writer from West Virginia to a list of illustrious writers.”

Over the past two decades, the series has included such luminaries as Galway Kinnell, Joy Harjo, Scott Cairns, Chaim Potok, David James Duncan, Naomi Shihab Nye, Leslie Leyland Fields, Dana Goia, Barry Spacks, Jeanne Murray Walker, Fady Joudah and Gassan Zaqtan, Hisham Matar, Paulann Petersen, Ron Hansen, and Santa Barbara Poet Laureate Chryss Yost.

Van Eerden was the 2014 VanderMey Nonfiction Prize Winner of Ruminate Magazine for her essay “Work Ethic.” “Glorybound” won ForeWord Reviews’ Editor’s Choice Fiction Prize.

Van Eerden, who began teaching at West Virginia Wesleyan College in 2012, was a visiting faculty member at Oregon Extension of Eastern University in Ashland (2009-11) and an adjunct instructor at Seattle Pacific University (2007-08).