Author Josh Weil will read excerpts from his fiction at 4:30 p.m. Thursday, April 5, in the Hazlewood Dining Room of MTSU’s James Union Building.

Josh Weil

A native of Virginia, Weil is the John and Renee Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi. He has received fellowships and awards from the Fulbright Foundation, the Dana Foundation, the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ conferences, the James Merrill House and the McDowell Colony.

The American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded Weil the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction for The New Valley, a collection of novellas. The book also received the New Writers Award from the Great Lakes Colleges Association and a “5 Under 35” award from the National Book Foundation.

Novelist Maureen Howard says Weil’s “rendering of place [in The New Valley] is strong as Flannery O’Connor’s; his engagement with the moral landscape of a sorry corner of the country is sure as Cormac McCarthy’s.”

This free public lecture is sponsored by the MTSU Department of English and the Virginia Peck Trust Fund. For more information, contact Dr. Robert C. Petersen at 615-898-2589 or rpeterse@mtsu.edu.

— Gina K. Logue (Gina.Logue@mtsu.edu)