Press release here:
Local authors Jen Fawkes and Janet Hurley will kick off UNC Asheville’s Fall 2010 Writers at Home series with a reading at 3 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 19, at Malaprop’s Bookstore/Café, 55 Haywood St., downtown Asheville. The event is free and open to the public.
Both Fawkes and Hurley were students in UNC Asheville’s Great Smokies Writing Program who went on to graduate school in creative writing and now live in the Asheville area.
Fawkes’ story “Dear Ahab,” will appear in the winter/spring issue of The Southeastern Review; the story is a finalist in the magazine’s World’s Best Short Story Contest. Her work has also appeared in Berkeley Fiction Review and Shenandoah. She was Editorial Assistant to Rod Smith on the 60th Anniversary Flannery O’Connor issue of Shenandoah. Fawkes’ first published story was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her novel-in-progress was named runner-up for the 2010 Melanie Hook Rice Novel Award. Fawkes is a 2010 graduate of Hollins University’s MFA creative writing program, and she was assistant editor of The Hollins Critic.
Janet Hurley is a freelance writer and frequent contributor to VERVE magazine. Her memoir, “Glove Shy,” is forthcoming from Brown Fedora Books. Hurley is the executive director of True Ink, which provides classes, workshops, publishing opportunities and summer camps for Asheville area young writers. She has been selected to discuss this work as a panelist at the 2011 Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference in Washington, D.C. Hurley received her MFA in creative writing from Lesley University.
The Writers at Home Series is sponsored by UNC Asheville’s Great Smokies Writing Program. For more information, call the program at 828/232-5122.