MOUNT VERNON — Cole Library at Cornell College will host readings by poet Kevin Prufer on Thursday, May 15, and New Zealand fiction writer Paula Morris on Tuesday, May 20.
Both readings, at 8 p.m. in Room 108 of Cole Library, are free and open to the public.
Prufer is the author of two books of poetry, “Strange Wood” (Pleiades/LSU, 1997) and “The Finger Bone” (Carnegie-Mellon, 2002), as well as the editor of The New Young American Poets (Southern Illinois University Press, 2001). He teaches at Central Missouri State University, where he edits Pleiades, a journal of new writing.
Of “The Finger Bone,” poet Susan Ludvigson says, “Prufer spins us into bizarre, occasionally uncomfortable recognitions. He does it through language so imaginatively brilliant that even the ominous and the sad are imbued with pleasure. I have not encountered such an exciting book in years.”
Morris wrote her first novel, “Queen of Beauty” (Penguin Books, 2002), while studying for a master’s degree in creative writing at New Zealand’s Victoria University, where the work won the Adam Foundation prize for best portfolio and has since landed on several best-of-2002 book lists in New Zealand. Her short fiction has been published in journals and magazines in New Zealand and the United States, including Landfall, Metro and Hayden’s Ferry Review.
Morris holds the inaugural Schaeffer Fellowship to the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been awarded a Teaching-Writing Fellowship for the next academic year. She earned a doctorate in American literature and has worked as a record company vice president in New York and as a frequent reviewer and writer for New Zealand newspapers and magazines.