Natalia Rachel Singer, whose bookScraping by in the Big Eightiescombines political commentary and memoir, will speak and read from her work Thursday, Jan. 19, at 7:30 p.m. in the Robinson Reading Room of Wise Library on the Downtown Campus.

The reading is hosted by the West Virginia University Council of Creative Writers, the Department of English and the Center for Women’s Studies.

Singer is an associate professor of English at St. Lawrence University whose fiction and essays have appeared in Ms., Harper’s, The American Scholar, Creative Nonfiction, Redbook, O: The Oprah Magazine, The Writer’s Chronicle, The Bellingham Review, Prairie Schooner, The Seneca Review, The North American Review ( where she is a contributing editor ), Shenandoah, and Alternet.org , among others. Her work has been anthologized in a number of books, among themMicrofiction,Collateral Language,Rooted in Rock,The Mammoth Book of Short Short Stories,The Best Writing on Writing,andReading Seattle: The City in Prose.

She is coeditor ofLiving North Country: Essays on Life and Landscapes in Northern New Yorkand has won several national awards for her writing.

She is currently completing a novel,Redemption Center ,and a book of travel essays,On Temple Road.

Scraping by in the Big Eightiesis part of the American Lives series edited by Tobias Wolff, and featuring books of literary nonfiction.

The reading is free and open to the public.