Award-winning faculty author to give reading

Skidmore writer-in-residence Greg Hrbek will give a reading of his work at 8 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 17, in Davis Auditorium, Palamountain Hall. Sponsored by the college's Department of English, the event is free and open to the public. 

A Skidmore faculty member since 2001, Hrbek is the author of the novel The Hindenburg Crashes Nightly (1999, Bard/Avon, USA), the story collection Destroy All Monsters (due from the University of Nebraska Press in 2011), and short stories that have been anthologized and published in magazines such as Harper's, Sonora Review, Conjunctions, and Salmagundi.

Hrbek has won a number of awards for his work, including the James Jones First Novel Award (1996) for The Hindenburg Crashes Nightly, the Black Warrior Review Fiction Prize (2007) for his story "Sagittarius," and the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction (2010) from the University of Nebraska Press for Destroy All Monsters. He also has received an Iowa Arts Fellowship from the University of Iowa, a James A. Michener Fellowship, and an Alfred Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University.

Earlier this year, Hrbek was one of five artists named as recipients of a U.S. Japan Creative Artists Fellowship, presented by the Japan-United States Friendship Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts.

The fellowship supports five leading contemporary and traditional artists from the United States as they spend up to five months in Japan as seekers, as cultural visionaries, and as living liaisons to the traditional and contemporary cultural life of Japan. Cultural understanding is at the heart of this program.

Hrbek will head to Japan in March and stay through July to work on a novel about World War II set in the Pacific. He began the novel while living in Saipan in the western Pacific Ocean during 2006-2008, a move he called inspirational. "I hardly knew about the Pacific before we arrived but once I got there and learned the specifics about the Battle of Saipan, I realized that I also had the beginnings of a new book," he explained.

The novel is not "straight realism. It contains magical elements in a story that is historically true," added Hrbek. He hopes to complete his research, which will require the help of a translator, while in Japan next spring.

The fellowship will clearly benefit Hrbek's writing, as well as his teaching. He says, "What I study and write helps ground me in my teaching." As an example he citedthe title story fromDestroy All Monsters, which he drafted while doing an assignment with one of his classes. "When teaching, I often want to be writing. But having to analyze and prepare literature for classes reminds me of how stories are crafted and helps me in my own writing," he added.

Hrbek is a 1990 graduate of Vassar College who earned an MFA degree in English at the University of Iowa in 1995.