Rocky Mount, N.C.—Allan Gurganus, award-winning novelist, short story writer, and painter, will read from his works on Tuesday, September 26, at 7:00 p.m. in the Dunn Center for the Performing Arts at North Carolina Wesleyan College. The event is the first in this year’s Visiting Writers Series at Wesleyan and is free and open to the public as part of Wesleyan’s 50^th Anniversary celebration. A book signing and reception will follow the reading.

A native of Rocky Mount, Gurganus is the author of the novels Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, which was a New York Times bestseller, Plays Well With Others, and collections of short stories, The Practical Heart and White People. The latter collection received the Los Angeles Times book prize and was a Pen/Faulkner finalist. His short fiction has appreared in the New Yorker, The Atlantic, and the Paris Review, and has been anthologized in The O Henry Prize collection, The Best American Short Stories 2001, the Anthology of American Short Fiction, and New Stories from the South.

Other recognition includes the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Southern Book Prize, the American Magazine Prize, and he is a 2006 John Simon Guggenheim Fellow.

Gurganus has taught writing at Duke, Stanford, The Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and Sarah Lawrence. He lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina.