LITERATURE + LECTURES

Brazos Bookstore presents The Oxford Project: Reading and Signing with Stephen Bloom, Friday, January 9,  at 7pm.

The Oxford Project   first began in 1984, when Peter Feldstein managed to photograph all but six people living in Oxford, Iowa (pop 676). Two decades later, Feldstein did it again. Considered side by side, the resulting “then & now” portraits reveal the startling and subtle ways that people both change and remain the same over the course of a generation.

The second time around, the residents of Oxford did more than just pose -- they talked. About their pasts, their dreams, their losses, and their secrets. One by one, they shared their most personal feelings and memories with Stephen G. Bloom, an award winning narrative journalist and professor from University of Iowa. The result is a stunning collection of the faces and stories that make up one small community in rural Iowa, but who we discover could just as well be from any place in America.

Stephen G. Bloom is the author of Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America, published in 2000. Postville was named a Best Book of the Year by MS-NBC,Chicago Sun-Times, Denver Rocky Mountain News, Chicago Tribune, and St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He also is the author of a collection of nonfiction stories, Inside the Writer's Mind, published in 2002.

Bloom has worked as a staff writer for The Los Angeles Times, Dallas Morning News, Sacramento Bee and San Jose Mercury News. He currently is under contract with St. Martin's Press to write Tears of Mermaids: The Secret History of Pearls, a nonfiction detective story. Since 1993, Bloom has taught at the University of Iowa, where he specializes in narrative journalism.

Join Brazos Bookstore for a special evening with Stephen Bloom.