Novelist Elizabeth Graver will read from her collection of work at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Nov. 17, in the West Virginia University Mountainlair Gold Ballroom.
Graver, the author of three novels and a professor of English at Boston College , will sign copies of her books following the public reading.
Elizabeth Graver is an outstanding writer with an uncanny ability to see into the hearts of complex characters,said Mark Brazaitis , professor of English and director of WVU s creative writing program .Ive read everything she has ever published, and its all wonderful.
Graver is author of three novelsAwake,The Honey ThiefandUnravellingthat are centered on bewildered, alienated children who use fantasy to make sense of a troubled world and the relationship they have with their mother.
Awaketells the story of a mother who seeks freedom for her young son and rediscovers her own need for it.The Honey Thiefillustrates a mother-daughter relationship and the way the past definesand deformsthe present.Unravellingis about a 19th-century yarn mill worker who becomes pregnant at 15 and is forced by her mother to give up her twins, leaving her angry and alone until she returns home 23 years later.
Some of Gravers works have received the nations most distinguished awards.Unravellingwas selected as Best Book of the Year by the Chicago Tribune and Glamour magazine and named one of The New York TimesNotable Books of the Year, as wasThe Honey Thief.Her short-story collectionHave You Seen Me?received the 1991 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, and her storyThe Mourning Doorwas awarded the Cohen Prize from Ploughshares.
Gravers work has also appeared in Seventeen, Story, Southwest Review, Self, Southern Review, Glimmer Train, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, Boulevard and the Boston Review. It has also been widely anthologized in Best American Short Stories(1991, 2001); Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards (1994, 1996, 2001); The Pushcart Prize Anthology (2001); and Best American Essays (1998).
She obtained her bachelors degree in English from Wesleyan University in 1986 and a Master of Fine Arts degree with a concentration in fiction from Washington University in 1990. She completed her doctoral study at Cornell University from 1990-92.
Additionally, she was named a Breadloaf Fellow, Fulbright recipient, National Endowment for the Arts fellow, Guggenheim fellow, fellow at MacDowell ArtistsColony and Blue Mountain Center ArtistsColony fellow.
Currently, she is working onPlants and Their Children,a series of linked novellas set in a summer community on Buzzards Bay from 1942 to 2000.
She has two young daughters.
For more information, contact Brazaitis at 304-293-9707 or ” Mark.Brazaitis@mail.wvu.edu rel=nofollow> Mark.Brazaitis@mail.wvu.edu .