O'Brien and "Oprah" author come to town

"Oprah" author Lott to read at SAM

Bret Lott, best known for authoring the Oprah Book Club selection "Jewel," will receive the fourth annual Denise Levertov Award and give a reading at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday at the Seattle Art Museum.

Besides "Jewel," Lott is the author of the story collection "The Difference Between Women and Men," the essay collection "Before We Get Started," and the novel "A Song I Knew by Heart." The Levertov Award, cosponsored each year by the Seattle Pacific University English Department and the journal Image, is presented each May to "an artist or creative writer whose work exemplifies a serious and sustained engagement with the Judeo-Christian tradition." Levertov, a well-known poet who spent her last years in Seattle, used her Christian belief as one of the themes in her work.

The previous recipients have been poets Madeline DeFrees and Franz Wright, and nonfiction writer Kathleen Norris. The event is free and open to the public. For more information go to www.imagejournal.org.

Mary Ann Gwinn Seattle Times book editor

O'Brien to speak on wartime writing

Award-winning author Tim O'Brien ("In the Lake of the Woods," "Going After Cacciato") touches down on both sides of Lake Washington next week, with appearances at Seattle's Richard Hugo House and the Bellevue Regional Library.

Hugo House Executive Director Lyall Bush will talk with O'Brien about "writing during wartime and after" at 7:30 p.m. May 15 at Richard Hugo House, 1634 11th Ave., Seattle, $10-$12 (206-322-7030 or www.hugohouse.org). The interview, says programs director Alix Wilber, will be followed by a "slam-bang party." The event is already sold out.

Then O'Brien visits the Eastside, where his book of interconnected war stories, "The Things They Carried," is the Bellevue Reads! selection of the year. The event takes place at 7 p.m. May 17, Bellevue Regional Library, Meeting Room 1, 1111 110th Ave. N.E., Bellevue; free (425-450-1765 or www.kcls.org).

— Michael Upchurch, Seattle Times book critic