Charles D’Ambrosio and Joyelle McSweeney will present a free reading at 8:15 p.m., Wednesday, Oct. 17, in the Frank Conroy Reading Room of the Glenn Schaeffer Library, adjacent to the Dey House.

D’Ambrosio, an alumnus and current visiting faculty member at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, is the author of the short story collections The Point and The Dead Fish Museum and an essay collection, Orphans.

Many of his stories originally appeared in the New Yorker, and he has also published fiction in the Paris Review, Zoetrope All-Story, and A Public Space. His work has been widely anthologized and selected for the Pushcart Prize, Best American Short Stories, and the O. Henry Award. His first book was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, and his most recent collection, The Dead Fish Museum, was a finalist for the Pen/ Faulkner Award. Among other awards, he has been the recipient of a Whiting Writer's Award and an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He recently received a Lannan Literary Fellowship.

McSweeney, a Writers’ Workshop alumna and a visiting faculty member in poetry, is the author of two hybrid-genre novels: Flet and Nylund, the Sarcographer. She is also the author of two volumes of poetry, The Commandrine and Other Poems and The Red Bird, which was chosen to inaugurate the Fence Modern Poets Series in 2001. With Johannes Göransson, she publishes Action Books and Action, Yes, a press and web-quarterly dedicated to international writing and hybrid forms.

The Iowa Writers' Workshop is a graduate program in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

For more information or accommodations contact the Writers' Workshop at 319-335-0416. For a UI arts calendar and details about upcoming events, visit the new Arts Iowa website.