Celebrated author and West Virginia University alumna Sara Pritchard will read from her latest work at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Feb. 26, in the Robinson Reading Room at the Wise Library on the Downtown Campus.

The reading is free and open to the public. It will be followed by a reception and book signing. The event is sponsored by the Department of English and the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences at WVU .

Pritchard is the author ofLately,a collection of 11 loosely-tied stories, published this year by Houghton Mifflin.

She is also the author ofCrackpots,which was awarded the Katharine Bakeless Nason Prize for fiction in 2002. The work was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 2003.

The WVU alumnas stories and essays have appeared in Arts and Letters, The Bellingham Review, The Chattahoochee Review and The Northwest Review, among other journals.

Latelyhas all the elements that enchanted readers of �€~Crackpotsbeautiful sentences, artful storytelling, a wickedly original voice and, of course, unforgettable crackpots,said Sigrid Nunez, author ofThe Last of Her Kind.

Pritchard has perfect comic pitch, intelligence to burn and writes the finest metaphors of any fiction writer I know.

Pritchard earned a masters of fine arts in creative writing from WVU and lives in Morgantown.

For more information, contact James Harms, Department of English, at James.Harms@mail.wvu.edu or 304-293-3107 ext 33451.