Reading to Feature Alumna Apricot Irving

Alumna Apricot (Anderson) Irving ’97, a memoirist and oral history writer, kicks off Westmont’s new Gender Studies Event Series with a reading and discussion Thursday, Sept. 1, at 4 p.m. at Hieronymus Lounge in Kerrwood Hall. The event, which is co-sponsored by the English department, is free and open to the public.

On Sept. 22 in New York City, Irving will receive the 2011 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award given annually to six women writers who demonstrate excellence and promise in the early stages of their careers. The $25,000 awards have helped many women build successful writing careers by offering encouragement and financial support at a critical time.

Irving’s work in progress, “The Missionary’s Daughter,” illustrates her life growing up on a missionary compound in Haiti. “Over the past 10 years, while living on three separate continents, I have struggled to describe the ambitious, renegade hospital compound that I once called home,” she says. “I tell of the missionaries’ jealousy and ambition, of their sacrifice and longing, of the endless, unwinnable battle to save Haiti—this reformer’s paradise, colonist’s bane.”

Irving’s work has appeared on This American Life, and an excerpt from her memoir will be published in More magazine later this year. After leaving Westmont, she earned a bachelor’s degree from University of Tennessee-Knoxville and a master’s degree in creative nonfiction from Portland State University. She founded and directed Boise Voices Oral History Project, a creative neighborhood response to gentrification. She lives with her husband and two sons in Portland, Ore.