This year’s Utah Humanities Book Festival features a special event for fans of authors Doug Rice and Marc Anthony Richardson. Located at Trolley Square’s Weller Book Works, the reading and discussion allows readers to meet the authors of these two newly-published novels. Western Humanities Review and Fiction Collective Two are hosting the event on Monday, October 3 at 7 p.m. This is just one of many literary events held across Utah during the months of September and October as part of the festival.
In Doug Rice’s ninth publication, Here Lies Memory, the author delves into the effects of gentrification in a Pittsburgh neighborhood and the traumas two families face while living there. “A man wills himself to go blind, not to forget, but to remember in new ways. Another man drinks beer after beer until he can no longer drink away what he must face,” describes the novel on its back cover. Rice is a professor at Sacramento State and won their Outstanding Scholar Award in 2015 and the University President’s Award for Scholarship in 2007.
Nominated for Best New American Voice in 2010 by Mills College, Marc Anthony Richardson focuses his debut novel, Year of the Rat, on minorities and the poor, dysfunctional families, sickness and mental disorders, the elderly and disabled, substance abuse, and over-medicating. Outlining the novel on his website, Richardson says, “in Year of the Rat, an artist returns to the dystopian city of his birth to tend to his invalid mother, only to find himself torn apart by memories and longings.”
Fiction Collective 2 is a non-profit organization run by authors and supported by a number of foundations and universities, including the University of Utah. Growing in membership from six members in 1974 to over 100 today, FC2 publishes the unique submissions of members and holds literary contests ever year.
The reading will take place at Weller Book Works, located at 607 Trolley Square in Salt Lake City. For more information on the event, click here.
-Brieanna Olds
