A memorial gathering for Ehud Havazelet, a professor of creative writing, will be held Saturday, March 12, in the Knight Library Browsing Room on the UO campus.

Havazelet died Nov. 5 at age 60. He joined the UO faculty in 1999.

The memorial will begin at 2 p.m. and will include remarks from fellow faculty members and students. The event will include a reading from Havazelet’s work and possibly a showing of photographs.

Havazelet is remembered as both a master craftsman and passionate teacher. In a tribute on the creative writing homepage, UO poetry professor Garrett Hongo characterizes his colleague as “fiery, brilliant, unstinting, mercurial, and very, very loving of our students and our shared enterprise of creating lasting work.”

“Havazelet will be remembered for the beauty and precision of his writing and for his generosity as a teacher and friend,” wrote staff writer Jeff Baker in a remembrance in the Oregonian.

Havazelet received a bachelor’s degree from Columbia University and an master of fine arts from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. He was named a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and went on to teach at Oregon State University before coming to the UO.

He was diagnosed with leukemia in 2002 and received a bone marrow transplant, living with the aftermath of cancer treatment until his death from complications of pneumonia.