Collection: 00931 - North Dakota Authors
Folder: 0000.000
Item: 00010
Title: David R. Solheim and Larry Alfred Woiwode at the opening of the Language of the Land: Journey into Literary North Dakota presentation at the ND Heritage Center
Date: 2/4/1994
Creator: Strand, Todd
Summary: David R. Solheim and Larry Alfred Woiwode, American writer who lives in North Dakota, where he has been the state's Poet Laureate since 1995. They are attending the opening Language of the Land: Journey into Literary North Dakota presentation at the ND Heritage Center. [biography] Dr. David R. Solheim (1947-) was born in Elgin (N.D.) and raised in Bismarck (N.D.), graduating from Bismarck High School in 1965. He has published poetry in over a dozen literary periodicals. In addition to the books: Riverbend: Poems, The landscape listens: Poems, We're the People Too: Tales from America's Largest Minority, Green Jade and Road Men, West River: 100 Poems, the Territorial Press (MN) published two chapbooks of his work, On The Ward (1973) and Inheritance (1987). His work has also been included in several anthologies. He received the John Hove Writing Fellowship from the North Dakota Council on the Arts and was an international exchange artist in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He was the North Dakota Statehood Centennial Poet and is an Emeritus Associate Poet Laureate of North Dakota. He has also published an interview, book reviews, and essays in several periodicals and edited anthologies of creative writing.
Solheim also had an award-winning teaching career of over 30 years, most of them at Dickinson State University and is a DSU Emeritus Professor of English. He traveled to the Peoples’ Republic of China with a North Dakota University System Faculty Group and was a visiting professor at Northwest Agriculture and Forestry University in Yang-ling, China. He has conducted creative writing workshops for kindergarten through graduate students, and for the general public including the elderly. He holds degrees in English and creative writing from Gustavus Adolphus College, Stanford University, and the University of Denver.
In 1968 Solheim married Joan Senzek, also a member of the Bismarck High School class of 1965, and they remained together until her death in 1997. Dave and Joan have two children, Benjamin Sung Ho and Julia Joo Hyun. In 2001 Dave married Dr. Barbara Laman (also an Emeritus Professor of English at DSU), together they have 5 children and 5 grandchildren. They live in St. Peter, MN.
[biography] Larry Alfred Woiwode (/'wa?w?di/; born October 30, 1941) is an American writer who lives in North Dakota, where he has been the state's Poet Laureate since 1995. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, The Atlantic Monthly, Harpers, Gentleman's Quarterly, The Partisan Review and The Paris Review. He is the author of five novels; two collections of short stories, a commentary titled "Acts," a biography of the Gold Seal founder and entrepreneur, Harold Schafer, Aristocrat of the West, a book of poetry, Even Tide; and reviews and essays and essay-reviews that have appeared in dozens of publications, including The New York Times and The Washington Post Book World. Woiwode's first novel, What I'm Going to Do, I Think (1969) won acclaim, and received the William Faulkner Foundation Award (1970) for the best first novel of 1969; Beyond the Bedroom Wall (1975) sold over 1,000,000 copies, and was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Talking about the title of this novel, Woiwode told Alok Mishra in an interview that he wanted to suggest that a larger world of interest lay beyond the bedroom. It was because most of the novels of that time dealt with sex excessively! He has received two awards from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, including the Medal of Merit, rewarded every six years, for a "distinguished contribution to the art of the short story": a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship and a Lannan Foundation Studio Award; the John Dos Passos Prize, for a distinguished body of work, and the Aga Khan Prize for short fiction, and the Theodore Roosevelt Roughrider Award, the highest honor a North Dakota citizen may receive, among other awards and prizes, and he has published two dozen stories in The New Yorker.
Born in Carrington, North Dakota, Woiwode attended the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) for four-and-a-half years, where he worked with John Frederick Nims and Charles Shattuck, and after serving as copywriter and voice-over and live talent for a CBS affiliate in the area he left to live in New York for five years; later he returned to New York state, after the death of John Gardner, and took Gardner's position as director of the Creative Writing Program at Binghamton University; he was a tenured full professor there, besides directing the Creative Writing Program. He spent several years living and working on short stories and his third novel in the Chicago area before returning to North Dakota in 1978, where he lives twelve miles outside Mott and raises registered quarter horses.
Besides his tenure at Binghamton, he has served as Writer in Residence at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and conducted summer sessions as a professor at Wheaton College, Chicago, and the C.S. Lewis Seminars at Cambridge; he has also conducted seminars and workshops in fourteen states of the U.S., all of the Canadian provinces but British Columbia, and in England, Lithuania, and the Scandinavians. His work has been translated into a dozen languages, and Johnathan Yardley, of the Washington Post Book Work, named Beyond the Bedroom Wall one of the 20 best novels of the 20th Century. Woiwode has published a dozen books in a variety of genres, six of which have been named notable books of the year by the New York Times Book Review. His most recent publications are two memoirs that were widely received and reviewed, What I Think I Did and A Step From Death. He is currently Writer in Residence at the University of Jamestown in Jamestown, North Dakota.
Red ID: PH_I_193301 Image ID: 172742 Image Notes: 00931-00010
