Tea & Talk Series Welcomes Washington Post Feature And Travel Writer, Hank Stuever, February 3

Chestertown, MD, January 27, 2004 — The Rose O'Neill Tea & Talk Series and the C. V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience present “A Conversation With Hank Stuever,” feature and travel writer for The Washington Post, Tuesday, February 3 at the O'Neill Literary House. The event is free and all are welcomed to enjoy tea, conviviality and discussion. Tea served at 4 p.m., talk begins at 4:30.

Stuever is recognized as one of the most engaging and original voices on the staff of The Washington Post, and in 2002 was lauded by The Columbia Journalism Review: “When people talk about innovative voices at the Post, they refer most frequently to the thirty-four-year-old Style writer Hank Stuever.” With the enviable job of an “at-large” reporter, he covers assignments ranging from a lengthy feature about a haunted waterbed store, to a heartfelt appreciation of Velma of "Scooby Doo" fame, to coverage of the 2002 Olympics and the 2003 explosion of the space shuttle Columbia. Stuever has twice been named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing—once for a story about a wedding (1993) and again for a story about the days following the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in his hometown of Oklahoma City (1996). He has won several state and national writing awards, and his work appears in the anthologies The Best American Travel Writing 2003, Telling Stories, Taking Risks: Journalism Writing at the Century's Edge and Best Newspaper Writing 1994. He has taught writing workshops in Portland, Seattle, Austin, Minneapolis and Atlanta. A collection of his essays, Off Ramp: Adventures and Heartache in the American Elsewhere, will be published this year by Henry Holt.

Stuever was born and raised in Oklahoma City and received his B.A. from Loyola University in New Orleans in 1991. He has been a reporter at The Albuquerque Tribune and the Austin American-Statesman. He has also written for the Los Angeles Times, Slate and L.A. Weekly. A selection of his work can be found online at www.hankstuever.com.

The Rose O'Neill Tea & Talk Series is held at Washington College's O'Neill Literary House, a large, eclectic Victorian home that reflects the spirit of the College's creative writing culture. Established in 1985, the Literary House was acquired and refurbished through a generous gift of alumna Betty Casey, Class of 1947, and her late husband Eugene, in memory of his late mother, Rose O'Neill Casey.