Holy Cross Kicks off Visiting Writers Series with Award-winning Author and Playwright

WORCESTER, Mass. – Award-winning author Kate Walbert will kick off the Visiting Writers Series at the College of the Holy Cross with a reading on Thursday, Sept. 24 at 7:30 p.m. in the Levis Reading Room at Dinand Library. The event, sponsored by the Jenks Chair in Contemporary American Letters and the Creative Writing Program, is free and open to the public.

Walbert is the author of four books including Our Kind, a National Book Award Finalist for fiction in 2004; The Gardens of Kyoto, winner of the 2002 Connecticut Book Award in Fiction; Where She Went, a collection of linked stories and a New York Times notable book; and her latest novel, A Short History of Women (Scribner, June 2009).

Leah Hager Cohen, the new Jenks Chair in Contemporary American Letters at the College and the organizer of the event, praised Walbert’s latest work on the front page of the New York Times Book Review:

“Wickedly smart… A gorgeously wrought and ultimately wrenching work of art… Each chapter is like a slice of exquisite cake… I found myself going back time and again to reread whole paragraphs, not because they’d been obscure, but in the way one might press a finger to the crumbs littering an otherwise cleaned plate: out of a desire to savor every morsel… Kate Walbert may work in miniature, but her scope is vast.”

She has also written numerous plays including Year of the Woman, produced at the Yale Cabaret and the Lantern Theater in Philadelphia; Quiet, She Said; and Elsewhere, which has had readings at Playwrights Horizons and Ars Nova, in New York, and the Marin Theater, in Marin, California.

Walbert lives in New York City with her husband and daughters.