Fiction writer Kathryn Davis to read at Washington University Feb. 17 and 22

Fiction writer Kathryn Davis will read from her work at 8 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 17, as part of Washington University’s Writing Program Spring Reading Series.

In addition, Davis will speak on the craft of fiction at 8 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 22.

Both events are free and open to the public and take place in Hurst Lounge, Room 201, Duncker Hall, on the university’s Hilltop Campus. A reception will follow each event, and copies of Davis’s books will be available for purchase after the reading.

For more information, call (314) 935-7130.

Davis, the visiting Fannie Hurst Professor of Creative Literature in the Department of English in Arts & Science, is the author of five novels: Labrador, The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf, The Walking Tour, Hell, and Versailles. Her sixth novel, The Thin Place, will be released in January 2006.

“Kathryn Davis’s fiction defies description,” says Kellie Wells, assistant professor of English and fiction writer on The Writing Program faculty. “No other writer boldly dares to claim-stake the same fictional territory. No one else writes a sentence like Davis or bores through the world’s deceptive veneer with the gimlet eye that she does. Her voice is one of the most interesting and original in American fiction.”

Davis has received a Kafka Prize for fiction by an American woman; the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She currently teaches at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.