Jo Ann Beard, the 2001 Virginia Butts Sturm Writer-in-Residence in the WVU Department of English, will have a public reading on Monday, October 15, 2001 at 7:30 p.m. in the Gold Ballroom of the WVU Mountainlair.

The Sturm Residency was established in 1986 by Albert Lee and Virginia Butts Sturm to support a visiting writer on the WVU campus for one week to give a public reading and meeting nightly with a group of students selected for the workshop. Beard is the author of Boys of My Youth. A graduate of the nonfiction program at the University of Iowa, she received a Whiting Writers’Award in 1997. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Story, and other magazines.

According to a New York Times Book Review,”Reading Jo Ann Beard’s prose feels as comfortable as falling into step beside an old, intimate friend. She’s the sort of writer whose charm lies in the voicea kitchen-table drawl entirely uncontaminated by sentimentality. . . . Beard remembers (or imagines) her childhood with an uncanny lucidity that startles.”

“The Sturm Residency is a rare and wonderful opportunity for WVU students,”said James Harms, Coordinator of the Creative Writing Program in the WVU Department of English.”To work closely with a writer of Jo Ann Beard’s caliber will enable these students to bring a fresh and new perspective to their work,”he added. The reading is open to the public and will be followed by a reception and booksigning.

For more information, contact the Department of English at 293-3107.