The SHSU Department of English is pleased to welcome to campus poet Alice Friman and Flannery O'Connor scholar Bruce Gentry. In addition to meeting with students and classes, Friman and Gentry will both present their work in events open to the public. Friman will read from her poetry at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, February 5, while Gentry will give a lecture, "Living Through the O'Connor Wars: Finding a Middle Ground," at 2 p.m. on Friday, February 6. Both events will be held in Austin Hall.

Friman's new book of poems, Vinculum, is forthcoming from LSU Press in 2011. She is the author of eight collections of poetry, most recently The Book of the Rotten Daughter from BkMk Press released in April 2006, and Zoo (Arkansas, 1999), winner of the Ezra Pound Poetry Award from Truman State University and the Sheila Margaret Motton Prize from the New England Poetry Club. Her poems appear in Poetry, The Georgia Review, Boulevard, The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, and Shenandoah, which awarded Friman the 2002 James Boatwright III Prize for Poetry. She's received fellowships from the Indiana Arts Commission and the Arts Council of Indianapolis and has been awarded residencies at many colonies including MacDowell and Yaddo. Professor Emerita at the University of Indianapolis, she now lives in Milledgeville, GA where she is Poet-in-Residence at Georgia College & State University.

Gentry is the author of Flannery O’Connor’s Religion of the Grotesque, the co-editor of Conversations with Raymond Carver, and the editor of the Flannery O'Connor Review. He is a professor in the Department of English, Speech, and Journalism at Georgia College & State University.

Both events are free and a reception will follow each with books available for purchase and for signing.

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