Charles Baxter and University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop alumna Arda Collins will present a free reading at 8 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 6, in the Frank Conroy Reading Room of the Glenn Schaeffer Library, adjacent to the Dey House.

Baxter is the author of five novels, five collections of short stories, three collections of poems, two collections of essays on fiction, and is the editor of other works. His most recent published collection, Gryphon: New and Selected Stories, was released in 2011. After completing graduate work in English at the State University of New York at Buffalo, he taught for several years at Wayne State University in Detroit. In 1989, he moved to the Department of English at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor and its MFA program. He now teaches at the University of Minnesota.

The New York Review of Books says, “Baxter is always engaged in a kind of chemistry experiment, closely monitoring what will ensue when two or more disparate elements are—often impulsively—combined. The results, always complex, can be surprising: and, like Miss Ferenczi in Gryphon, they can bring us wonders we had not known we might see.” And the Los Angeles Times says, “Baxter shines [a] bright light on his characters, so bright that the landscape around them, in almost every story, shimmers like a mirage in extreme heat.”

Collins’ poems have been published in journals and magazines including The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, A Public Space, and Gutcult, where she is an editor. Some of her poetry was published in the Yale University Press book It Is Daylight.

Louise Gluck, writer-in-residence at Yale, writes of It Is Daylight, “Arda Collins' savage, desolate, brutally ironic first book has the electric excitement of a master performance conducted in a deliberately isolated space, as though isolation were a form of control that promoted fluency... At the heart of the poems' struggle is shame, which results not from something the speaker has done, from action, but rather from being, from what she is or what she lacks... This is a book of dazzling modernity… Caustic, pithy, ruthlessly sharp witted and keen-eyed… The result is a book of astonishing originality and intensity, unprecedented, unrepeatable.”

Collins was the winner of the 2008 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition, and received the 2008 American Academy of Arts and Sciences' (AAAS) Poetry Prize and 2008 May Sarton Prize.

The Iowa Writers’ Workshop is a graduate program in the UI 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.