Acclaimed fiction writer to visit MSU for Price Caldwell Visiting Writers Series

Contact: Becky Hagenston

Mary Miller, pictured standing on a hilly road.

STARKVILLE, Miss.—Acclaimed fiction writer Mary Miller will give a public reading on Sept. 15 as part of the Mississippi State University Department of English’s Price Caldwell Visiting Writers Series.

Free to all, Miller’s presentation begins at 5:30 p.m. in the amphitheater area on the south end of the Old Main Academic Center. In case of rain, the event will be held in the Old Main Academic Center's Turner A. Wingo Auditorium. A book signing follows the reading. Her reading also will be streamed via WebEx at this link.

Miller also will speak with students in the English department’s intermediate fiction class, taught by MSU Professor of English Becky Hagenston.

Established through an endowment from widow Alice Carol Caldwell and family, the Price Caldwell Visiting Writers Series serves as a memorial to Price Caldwell, who served for more than 20 years as an MSU associate professor of English and died in 2015. He also founded and directed the university’s creative writing program, along with serving as president and vice president for the Southern Literary Festival organization.

Miller is the author of two collections of short stories, “Big World” and “Always Happy Hour,” as well as the novels “The Last Days of California” and “Biloxi.” Her stories have appeared in the Paris Review, Pushcart Prize XLIV, Oxford American, New Stories from the South, Norton's Seagull Book of Stories, The Best of McSweeney’s Quarterly, American Short Fiction, Mississippi Review and many other places. She is a former James A. Michener Fellow in Fiction at the University of Texas and John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi. She is a faculty member in the Mississippi University for Women’s MFA in Creative Writing program.

For additional information about Miller’s campus visit and reading, contact Becky Hagenston at bhagenston@english.msstate.edu.

MSU is Mississippi’s leading university, available online at www.msstate.edu.