Award-winning author Malena Watrous will read from her work as part of the Visiting Writers Series at the College of the Holy Cross on Thursday, March 31 at 7:30 p.m. in the Rehm Library. The event, sponsored by the College’s Creative Writing Program, is free and open to the public.
Watrous is a fiction writer whose stories and essays have appeared inThe Alaska Quarterly Review, The Believer, GlimmerTrain, The Massachusetts Review, Salon.com, StoryQuarterly, TriQuarterly, the San Francisco Chronicle, the New York Times, and elsewhere. Her first novel, If You Follow Me—a fish-out-of-water romance story—was published by Harper Perennial last year. It is set in Shika-Machi, Japan, the nuclear power plant town where Watrous herself spent two years teaching English after graduating from college. Critics have described it as “fearlessly honest, occasionally heartbreaking, and extremely funny.”
If You Follow Mereceived both the Michener-Copernicus Award and a GlimmerTrain fiction award, and was a runner-up in the annual Pirate’s Alley/Faulkner contest. Watrous’s writing has also been recognized with a Truman Capote Fellowship at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she received her M.F.A. in writing, as well as a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and Jones Lectureship at Stanford University, where she currently teaches.
Watrous lives in her home city of San Francisco with her husband, son, and two cats. She is currently working on a new novel.
The 2011 Visiting Writers Series will also include the following readings and performances:
- Thursday, April 7– Sydney Lea; poet, novelist, nonfiction writer, and founder of the New England Review
- Thursday, May 5– Robert Cording; poet and professor of English and creative writing at Holy Cross
