Retired professor and West Virginia author Judith Stitzel will deliver a talk titled “Making the Years Count,” featuring passages from her recently published book, “Field Notes from Grief: The First Year.”

The talk and book reading on Friday, Oct. 26, will begin at 1 p.m. in the Bluestone Room of the West Virginia University Mountainlair. A book signing will follow on the first floor. This event is sponsored by the WVU Center for Women’s and Gender Studies to help kick off Mountaineer Week celebrations.

“Field Notes from Grief,” is a unique collaboration of Stitzel and artist Claudia Giannini, based on the private journals Stitzel kept during the year after her husband’s death. Highlighting the emotional contradictions of grieving, Stitzel uses honesty, humor and candor to take the reader through her very personal, emotional journey.

Judith Gold Stitzel is a retired professor of English and women’s studies at WVU where she and her husband, Bob, started their teaching careers in 1965. She was the founding director of the WVU Center for Women’s Studies. She has published fiction, nonfiction and literary criticism in Colorado Quarterly; Frontiers, a Journal of Women Studies; College English, Green Mountain Review and other journals and anthologies. She has a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from Vermont College and has twice been a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Stitzel resides in Morgantown.

The Center for Women’s and Gender Studies supports teaching, research and advocacy that is based on feminist perspectives and centered on analyses of gender and its intersection with race, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, age and ability.

For more information, contact the Center at wmst@mail.as.wvu.edu.

-WVU-

BLL/10/09/12

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