SPRING WRITERS-IN-RESIDENCE TO READ

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. - The University of Arkansas Programs in Creative Writing and Translation are pleased to welcome two Writers-in-Residence for the spring semester, poet Davis McCombs and fiction writer Mary Morrissy. McCombs and Morrissy will read in Giffels Auditorium at 8 p.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 20.

McCombs is teaching the Graduate Poetry Workshop this semester as well as a course on the Form and Theory of Poetry. Morrissy is teaching the Graduate Fiction Workshop and a course in Irish literature.

After receiving a B.A. from Harvard University, where he studied under Seamus Heaney, and an MFA from the University of Virginia, McCombs was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University from 1996 to 1998. In 1999, W.S. Merwin selected his book Ultima Thule (Yale University Press, 2000) for the Yale Younger Poets Prize. McCombs’ poem,"The River and Under the River" was chosen by Adrienne Rich for inclusion in The Best American Poetry 1996.

Other work has appeared in The Missouri Review - which in 1998 named McCombs its Tom McAfee Discovery Feature poet - no roses review, and The Columbia Poetry Review. For the past several years, he has lived in Munfordville, Ky., and worked as a park ranger at Mammoth Cave.

Morrissy was born in Dublin, Ireland. She has published three books: A Lazy Eye, a collection of short stories, and two novels, Mother of Pearl and The Pretender. In 1995, she was awarded a Lannan Literary Award, and Mother of Pearl was shortlisted for the Whitbread Award. Her most recent novel, The Pretender, has been nominated for the International IMPAC Award 2002. She has worked as a journalist and copy editor and reviews fiction for The Irish Times. Last year, she was a writer-in-residence at University College Cork, and she will teach at the University of Iowa’s summer program at Trinity College, Dublin, in 2002.

Generously funded by the Walton foundation, this reading is free and open to the public.

# # #