Contact: Sasha Steinberg

STARKVILLE, Miss.—Author and educator Susan Perabo will deliver a public reading Monday [Sept. 16] as part of the Mississippi State University Department of English’s Price Caldwell Visiting Writers Series.

Free to all, Perabo’s presentation begins at 5 p.m. in Mitchell Memorial Library’s John Grisham Room. A public reception and book signing will follow.

Perabo also is scheduled to speak with students in the English department’s Creative Writing and American Short Stories classes, taught by MSU Professor of English Michael Kardos. Also serving as co-director of the department’s creative writing program, Kardos was honored this spring with the John Grisham Master Teacher Award for excellence in classroom instruction.

Established through an endowment from widow Alice Carol Caldwell and family, the Price Caldwell Visiting Writers Series serves as a memorial to Tutweiler native Price Caldwell, who served for more than 20 years as an MSU associate professor of English and died in 2015. He also founded and directed the university’s creative writing program, along with serving as president and vice president for the Southern Literary Festival organization.

Perabo is the author of the short story collections “Who I Was Supposed to Be” and “Why They Run the Way They Do,” and the novels “The Broken Places” and “The Fall of Lisa Bellow.” Her fiction has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, Pushcart Prize Stories, and New Stories from the South, and has appeared in numerous magazines, including One Story, Glimmer Train, The Iowa Review, The Missouri Review, and The Sun. She is writer-in-residence and professor of English at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and also serves on the faculty of the low-residency Master of Fine Arts Program at Queens University. She holds an MFA degree from the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville.

For additional information about Perabo’s campus visit and lecture, contact Kardos at 662-325-3644 or MKardos@english.msstate.edu.

MSU’s College of Arts and Sciences includes more than 5,300 students, 300 full-time faculty members, nine doctoral programs and 25 academic majors offered in 14 departments. Complete details about the College of Arts and Sciences and its Department of English can be found at www.cas.msstate.edu and www.english.msstate.edu.

MSU is Mississippi’s leading university, available online at www.msstate.edu.