Charles Baxter reading at UGA

Author Charles Baxter will read from his work at CINE Theatre at 234 West Hancock Avenue in downtown Athens at 7 p.m. The event is sponsored by the Leighton-Ballew Lecture Fund and UGA Creative Writing Program; it is free and open to the public. Baxter is the author of The Soul Thief published in September, 2008 by Pantheon. His novel The Feast of Love (Pantheon/Vintage) was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2000 and has been made into a film by Robert Benton, starring Morgan Freeman. He has published three other novels, Saul and Patsy, First Light and Shadow Play, and four books of stories, most recently Believers, published by Pantheon in hardback and Vintage in paperback. He has also published essays on fiction collected in Burning Down the House (Graywolf) and Beyond Plot , and has edited or co-edited three books of essays, The Business of Memory, published by Graywolf, Bringing the Devil to His Knees (The University of Michigan Press), and A William Maxwell Portrait, published in 2004 by W. W. Norton. His book of poems, Imaginary Paintings, was published by Paris Review Editions. He also edited Best New American Voices 2001 (Harcourt) and was the judge for the Bakeless Prize in Fiction in 2004. He has received the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Prix St. Valentine in France, and the Catalan Booksellers’ Association Award for book of the year in Spain. He was born in Minneapolis in 1947, graduated from Macalester College with a B. A. degree in 1969, and the State University of New York at Buffalo with a Ph.D. in 1974, and lived for many years in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he taught at the University of Michigan. He now lives in Minneapolis and is currently the Edelstein-Keller Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Harper’s, among other journals and magazines. His fiction has been widely anthologized and translated into ten languages.