An award-winning author will spend next week on the West Virginia University campus reading from her works and leading writing workshops as the 2003 Virginia Butts Sturm Writer-in-Residence in WVU s Department of English.

Nancy Zafris, whose books and short stories have garnered critical acclaim, will give a reading at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Oct. 13, in the Mountainlair Gluck Theatre. She will sign copies of her books following the reading, which is free and open to the public.

Zafris will also meet Oct. 14-16 with 12 students selected for the Virginia Butts Sturm Writer-in-Residence Workshop. The Virginia Butts Sturm Writer-in-Residence program brings a nationally renowned writer to campus each fall to give a public reading and provide guidance to students aspiring to be authors. The residency is made possible through an endowment from the late Albert Lee and Virginia Butts Sturm.

Zafrislatest book, The Metal Shredders, was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year for 2003. She has also won the Flannery OConnor award for short fiction and the Ohioana Library Association award for her first book, The People I Know.

Her short stories have appeared in more than two dozen literary magazines, including The Missouri Review, New England Review, Antioch Review, Glimmer Train, The Kenyon Review, Witness and StoryQuarterly.

She is the fiction editor of The Kenyon Review and an associate faculty member of Antioch Los Angeles, where she teaches in the low-residency masters degree in fine arts program. She has also taught fiction writing at the University of Pittsburgh, Ohio State University, Centre College and the Kenyon Review summer program.

In 2000 Zafris was a Senior Fulbright professor at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. She is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, the Greater Columbus Arts Council and the Massachusetts Arts Council.