Fiction Writer Charles Baxter will read from his work at 8 p.m. Thursday, March 27, for the Writing Program Reading Series at Washington University in St. Louis.
The reading is free and open to the public and takes place in Hurst Lounge, located on the second floor of Duncker Hall, in the northwest corner of Brookings Quadrangle, near the intersection of Hoyt and Brookings drives. Copies of Baxter’s works will be available for purchase and a book-signing will follow the reading. For more information, call (314) 935-7130.
Baxter is the author of three novels, most recently The Feast of Love (Pantheon, 2000); and four collections of short fiction, including A Relative Stranger (Viking Penguin, 1991) and Believers (Vintage, 1998). He has published a book of essays on the craft of fiction, Burning Down the House (Graywolf, 1997), as well as three collections of poetry, and also has edited three anthologies, of fiction and of essays.
Baxter’s work has earned wide acclaim and he has been the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation and the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund. His work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories five times. Since 1989, he has taught English and creative writing at the University of Michigan, where until recently he served as director of the MFA program.
“In his fiction, Charles Baxter examines the subtle but nevertheless seismic reverberations issuing from the unpredictable tectonics of everyday life,” says Kellie Wells, assistant professor of English in Arts & Sciences at Washington University. “His characters stumble and grope, seek shelter, often blinded by some small illumination that, like the fierce grace granted the characters in Flannery O’Connor’s stories, they might rather live without. Baxter writes fiction filled with incisive observations that reveal the poignancy of quiet lives and rendered in lapidary prose whose shimmer you only notice after you reach the last word.”