Awarding winning writer Dr. Damian Dressick will speak on Tuesday, March 19, at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford.
The event, which is free and open to the public, will be held at 7:30 p.m. in the Mukaiyama University Room in the Frame-Westerberg Commons.
Dr. Nancy McCabe, professor of writing and director of Pitt-Bradford’s writing program, said she invited Dressick to campus because she thought students would admire and relate to him.
“As a writer, teacher, and director of Writers Association of Northern Appalachia, Damian has an interesting range of work that will interest our students,” she said.
Dressick, author of “40 Patchtown” and “Fables of the Deconstruction,” made a name for himself in short fiction, primarily writing stories around Appalachian themes. He is the winner of the Harriette Arnow Award and Jesse Stuart Prize and has had a lengthy career of professional and academic writing, including as a Blue Mountain Residency Fellow.
Dressick earned his Master of Fine Arts from the University of Pittsburgh and his doctorate from the University of Southern Mississippi. He has taught at Pitt, Clarion University, Robert Morris University and Penn State.
Dressick is often described as someone who specializes in short form stories, or “flash fiction.” In his breakout short-story collection, “Fables of the Deconstruction,” he writes 64 in 169 pages.
During an interview with Pittsburgh’s local NPR station, Dressick discussed flash fiction’s role in modern context.
“I guess I'd say our lives are overscheduled and our attention spans tend to be diminished,” Dressick said, “and we're constantly being bombarded by messages. So, I think that that’s sort of our psychological ecosystem. … It’s bite size enough that you're not making these kind of large-scale temporal commitments to a story.”
Dressick is also one of the co-hosts of a virtual reading series that brings together Appalachian writers to display their work to a potentially global audience.
He describes himself and his partner as “energetic stewards of the Writers Association of Northern Appalachia, advocating for and supporting writing in this region that has spawned some of the leading practitioners of flash fiction nationally.”