STARKVILLE, Miss.--Award-winning fiction author Kelly Magee reads from her works Feb. 5 during the latest event of Mississippi State's 2009 Robert Holland Visiting Writers Series.
The free program begins at 7:30 p.m. in the Colvard Student Union's third-floor Folkes Auditorium. The university's English department is sponsor.
"Body Language," Magee's first book, won the 2006 Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Short Fiction. With the South as the backdrop, its 11 stories delve into the unseen worlds of modern culture wars through characters situated on the fringes of society, each looking for identity and a sense of place.
Magee, an assistant English professor at Western Washington University in Bellingham, is a 1999 Auburn University graduate who went on to complete a master of fine arts degree in fiction writing at Ohio State in 2003.
Recently, a section of Magee's novel-in-progress, "Go," won the Hotel Amerika Fiction Award. Her stories have appeared in Ninth Letter, and the Colorado, Crab Orchard, Black Warrior, and Indiana literary reviews, among others.
Author Dan Chaon, a National Book Award finalist, has praised Magee as "an exciting new literary talent," and "Body Language" for its "visionary stories [that] bring us an America that is as phantasmagoric as a Bosch painting come to life, yet as real as the daily news."
For more on Magee's campus appearance, telephone 662-325-2317.
For more information about Mississippi State University, see http://www.msstate.edu/.
