Author Lawrence Coates to Discuss Book  at the Saratoga Blossom Festival

Author and Educator Lawrence Coates will give a lecture on his book, The Blossom Festival on

April 29 at 1 PM at the Warner Hutton House during the Blossom Festival in Saratoga.  The talk will cover the research that went into the book, including interviewing some of the performers at the Blossom Festival and other archival discoveries.    This is the first time he has given the lecture in Saratoga.  He grew up in El Cerrito and frequently visited his grandfather, Bert Bertelsen, who was the last working blacksmith in Saratoga.

The Blossom Festival is held at 13777 Fruitvale Avenue in Saratoga and the Heritage Orchard on April 29 from 10 to 4 PM.  The Festival is free to the public.  Free parking at parking lot 4 at West Valley College.

Coates has written five books which have all won awards. The Blossom Festival, won the Western States Book Award for Fiction and was selected for the Barnes and Nobel Discover Great New Writers series. His second novel, The Master of Monterey, was published in 2003 and his third novel, The Garden of the World, was published in 2012 and won the Nancy Dasher Award from the College English Association of Ohio. In 2015 he, he published, The Goodbye House, a novel set amid the housing tracts of San Jose in the aftermath of the first dot com bust and the attacks of 9/11. Also in 2015, he published a novella, Camp Olvido, set in a labor camp in California’s Great Central Valley.  His work has been recognized with the Donald Barthelme Prize in Short Prose, the Miami university Press Novella Prize, an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction. He is currently a professor of creative writing at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.

Coates holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of California at Santa Cruz.  Master’s degree at Berkeley and went on to earn his doctorate at the University of Utah.

For more information:  contact Annette Stransky at [email protected]