Acclaimed author Sigrid Nunez to read March 30 and April 4

Acclaimed fiction writer Sigrid Nunez, the visiting Fannie Hurst Professor of Creative Literature in Arts & Sciences, will read from her work at 8 p.m. Thursday, March 30.

In addition, Nunez will speak on the craft of fiction at 8 p.m. Tuesday, April 4.

Both events — part of The Writing Program’s spring Reading Series — are free and open to the public and take place in Hurst Lounge, Room 201, Duncker Hall, on the university’s Hilltop Campus. Duncker Hall is located at the northwest corner of Brookings Quadrangle, near the intersection of Brookings and Hoyt drives. For more information, call (314) 935-7130.

Nunez has published five novels, most recently The Last of Her Kind (2006), a meditation on the nature of idealism set against a backdrop of gender, racial and cultural politics. Her work has appeared in two Pushcart Prize volumes as well as four anthologies of Asian-American literature. Her first novel, A Feather on the Breath of God (1995), was a finalist for both the PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction and the Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers Award. It also received the Association for Asian American Studies Award for best novel of the year.

Mitz (1998), a mock biography of Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s pet monkey, won the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Other honors include a Whiting Writer’s Award and a residency from the Lannan Foundation.

Nunez lives in New York City and teaches in the New School’s graduate writing program.