Creative Writing Professor Jennifer Sinor to Read New Story at Kiger Hour

**Please note: Due to Montez Brothers’ closing and cancellation of events, Kiger Hours has been moved to Café Sabor, 600 West Center Street, Logan. November’s Kiger Hour will be held in the upstairs event room. Kiger Hour organizers apologize for the inconvenience and invite everyone to the new location.

Jennifer Sinor, associate professor of English at Utah State University, will share a story that took her 40 years to write at the next Kiger Hour talk Nov. 15. Her story, “Memories of the Future,” is about her brother and the fine line that exists between the lost and the saved, the mad from the sane, Sinor said.

She is chair of the creative writing program in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. Her writings and teachings focus on memoir, personal essays and braided narrative.

Sinor’s work has appeared in The American Scholar, The Norton Reader, Utne and The Chronicle of Higher Education and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize earlier this year. She is the author of the book The Extraordinary Work of Ordinary Writing, a finalist for the MLA First Book Award, and co-editor of Placing the Academy: Essays on Landscape, Work, and Identity.

Sinor wrote her first novel at age 8. She discovered two years later how difficult the life of a writer could be after failing to sell any of her work at the school fair while the other children sold candy. Out of pity, Sinor suspects, her teacher commissioned a poem about a police officer. However, the subject “held no literary appeal or urgency,” so she didn’t write the poem. Sinor left school knowing two things about writing: that art didn’t draw like sugar and that she would never be rich, Sinor said. Her story “Memories of the Future” is a piece about a police officer.

“It has only taken [me] 40 years to figure out the story [I] wanted to tell,” she said.

Kiger Hour is an intellectual program presented by Utah State University and sponsored by the College of Humanities and Social Sciences and the Caine College of the Arts. The event will be held Thursday, Nov. 15 from 5:15 to 7 p.m. at Café Sabor, 600 West Center Street, Logan.

Cost is $6.95 per person (plus tax and gratuity) and billed on an individual basis. Guests will also be able to order from the regular menu if desired.

For planning purposes, please RSVP to Natalie Archibald Smoot in the college office, 435-797-2796, or email, natalie.archibald@usu.edu.

Looking ahead, there is no Kiger Hour talk in December. The next timepiece will be Jan. 17, 2013.

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Source: College of Humanities and Social Sciences

Contact: Natalie Smoot, (435) 797-2796, natalie.archibald@usu.edu