Beth Lordan to read at Graduate Conference

Fiction writer and professor Beth Lordan will read at the Southeast Missouri State University English Graduate Student Conference on April 14 at 7 P.M, in the University Center Ballroom A. The reading is free and open to the public.

Lordan received her BA and MFA from Cornell University, and has been at SIUC since 1991. She teaches fiction workshops and forms courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels, and currently directs Irish and Irish Immigration Studies. She is the author of three books: August Heat, a novel (Harper & Row 1987); And Both Shall Row, stories (Picador, 1998); and But Come Ye Back, a novel in stories (William Morrow, 2004). Her literary heroes are Virginia Woolf, Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, James Agee, Alistair MacLeod, and William Trevor; she admires the work of contemporary fiction writers like J. M. Coetzee, Joanna Scott, Alice McDermott, David Long, Toni Morrison, and Alice Munro. Her short fiction has appeared in Farmers Market, Gettysburg Review, The Atlantic Monthly, O.Henry Prize Stories, and Best American Short Stories, and has earned awards from the New York State Council on the Arts, the Illinois Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She’s currently working on more stories, and writing a book on form.