hansostrom.com
June 15, 2010
News: Hans Ostrom’s new novel, Honoring Juanita, has been published and is available from amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, Ingram Books, and other vendors. A bit about the book:
“The global scramble for energy has made a river in California’s High Sierra ripe for damming. Mary Bluestone, woodcarver and longtime resident of a remote mountain town, impulsively puts herself between the river and the dam, becoming a protester in spite of herself. Mary’s husband, the county sheriff, must arrest her. A flood of unintended consequences ensues as the 21st century invades a pristine canyon. Meanwhile, Mary Bluestone is haunted by the legend of Juanita, a woman lynched during the Gold Rush Era. Honoring Juanita is a tale of entangled histories and divided loyalties, of greed, power, memory, marriage, and love.”
Hans grew up in Sierra City, a town of 200 in California’s Sierra Nevada. He earned a B.A., an M.A., and a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Davis, where he studied poetry-writing with Karl Shapiro.
Hans is a poet, short-story writer, and novelist. He’s also published academic articles and books, edited anthologies, and written screenplays.
His books include The Coast Starlight: Collected Poems 1976-2006, Three To Get Ready (a novel), A Langston Hughes Encyclopedia, and Subjects Apprehended: Poems. With Wendy Bishop and Katharine Haake, he wrote Metro: Journeys in Writing Creatively, and with J. David Macey, he edited The Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American Literature (5 volumes).
Here’s a link to the chapbook, Subjects Apprehended (2009).
Since 2007, he’s kept the blog, Poet’s Musings, going, as well as Red Tales, an open-ended collection of flash fiction and other short prose pieces. Hans teaches creative writing, African American literature, poetry, and rhetoric at a small college in the Pacific Northwest.
The Special Collections department of Stanford University’s Library holds “The Hans Ostrom Papers,” composed chiefly of correspondence from Karl Shapiro, Stephen Spender, Rita Dove, Wendy Bishop, Richard Hugo, and other writers.
Hans is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and the PEN/American Center. As a Fulbright Senior Lecturer, he taught at Uppsala University, and he also taught at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany.
Hans is completing a novel about a plague that gives men too much to think about. He’s also developing a collection of short stories with two other Pacific Northwest writers, and he’s working on scripts with a veteran Hollywood screenwriter.
With noted scholar and political scientist William Haltom, Hans maintains the blog, Politics and Language.
