Yates, Dwight 1942-

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Yates, Dwight 1942-

PERSONAL:

Born 1942, in MT. Education: Portland State University, B.A., 1964; University of Montana, M.A., 1970; University of Arizona, A.B.D., 1976.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Redlands, CA. Office—Department of Creative Writing, University of California, Riverside, 1607 HMNSS Bldg., 900 University Ave., Riverside, CA 92521. E-mail—[email protected]; [email protected].

CAREER:

Served in the Peace Corps; Tabora Boys School, Tabora, Tanzania, instructor, 1965-67; University of Montana, Missoula, graduate assistant, 1967-70, instructor, 1970-72; University of Arizona, Tucson, graduate assistant and associate in teaching, 1972-79, director of McKale Writing Clinic, 1979-80; University of Redlands, Salzburg, Austria, adjunct faculty, 1987; University of California, Riverside, lecturer, 1981—. Military service: Served in the U.S. military.

AWARDS, HONORS:

National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, 1993; Serena MacDonald Kennedy fiction award, for Haywire Hearts and Slide Trombones; Juniper Prize for Fiction, University of Massachusetts, 2005.

WRITINGS:

(Editor, with Nancy Carrick) A Student's Guide to Freshman Composition, Burgess (Minneapolis, MN), 1980.

Haywire Hearts and Slide Trombones (stories), Snake Nation Press (Valdosta, GA), 2005.

Bring Everybody: Stories, University of Massachusetts Press (Amherst, MA), 2006.

Work represented in anthologies, including Best of the West 5: New Stories from the Wide Side of the Missouri, edited by James Thomas and Denise Thomas, W.W. Norton (New York, NY), 1992; and Inlandia: A Literary Journey through California's Inland Empire, Heyday Books, 2006. Contributor to literary journals, including Northwest Review, Sonora Review, ZYZZYVA, Western Humanities Review, Puerto Del Sol, and Quarry West.

SIDELIGHTS:

Dwight Yates is a Montana-born writer whose work has appeared in literary journals and in anthologies, as well as in his own collections. His award-winning Bring Everybody: Stories is a collection that includes the title story, about a retiree who tells college students of his life experiences and then becomes attached to a woman. The art scholar in "Giselda" visits the lover of his wife and urinates on his carpet. The house-sitting couple in the opening story, "The Black Mercedes," are visited by the homeowner's friend, a man who dies as soon as he arrives. The protagonists of "Oceanside, 1985" are a young couple expecting a baby, who are planning their first house. The man in "A Certain Samaritan" becomes caught up in the lives of a couple he picks up while on the road. In "Persimmons" a man is trapped on the roof when his ladder falls away.

The collection was reviewed by a Kirkus Reviews contributor, who praised Yates's writing with its "lengthy, detail-rich paragraphs and a taste for bone-dry ironic humor," but felt that it exhibited a level of "academic formality." The reviewer concluded by writing: "Yates is a wise stylist who knows exactly where he wants to go."