Fiction author to read from her work March 11

Fiction writer Rebecca Rotert, the author of Last Night at the Blue Angel, will give a reading from her work at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, March 11, in Lane Library on the Ripon College campus, 300 Seward St. Admission is free. Her visit is sponsored by the College’s Visiting Writers Series.

Rotert received a master’s degree from Hollins College in Virginia where she was the recipient of the Academy of American Poets Prize. Her poetry and essays have appeared in Santa Clara Review, America magazine, Hospital Drive Journal of Literature and Humanities, Temenos journal and Outside-In magazine. Her essay Proteus on the Vasa was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Last Night at the Blue Angel is her first novel.

“One never really knows the story one is going to tell,” Rotert says. “In life and art, alike, I suppose. In both, I’ve been surprised, more often than not, by the characters who have turned up out of the blue, by the twists and reveals, by the trade-offs and losses and delights.

“I didn’t know the story I was about to tell when I started Last Night at the Blue Angel. I was seized by a voice in my head, this plucky, angsty kid, caught in the crosshairs of her mother’s insatiable need for attention, intimacy, obliteration, celebrity. Whereas the kid’s desire is simple. She wants to be the one her mother chooses, the only one. It seemed a simple question posed me: Can the mother choose her? Or will her other hungers win out?”

Rotert lives in Omaha, Nebraska. Her website is at http://www.rebeccarotert.com/