EUGENE–David Bradley, whom the Los Angeles Times tagged as "perhaps the most significant … new male black author since James Baldwin," will give a free reading on Thursday,
Feb. 17, at the University of Oregon as part of the Creative Writing Program’s Reading Series.

His reading is set for 8 p.m. in the Browsing Room of the Knight Library, 1501 Kincaid St. A book signing will follow.

Author of the award-winning "The Chaneysville Incident," Bradley will serve as the UO Creative Writing Program’s distinguished visiting writer in fiction through spring term.

Called "brutal, spectacular, discursive, academic, dense, polemic and, ultimately, brilliant…" by the Los Angeles Times, Bradley is a contributor to the nation’s leading publications, including The New Yorker, Harper’s, the New York Times Magazine, the Los Angeles Times and The Village Voice. He frequently writes on topics pertaining to the African American experience including "Black and American" for Esquire, "Portrait of a Small Black Church" for the New York Times Magazine and "The Nonexistence of Black History, and Other Tales From the Road" for the Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine.

A former Temple University professor, he also has written eight screenplays and has presented dozens of papers in academic venues.

Bradley has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction and a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship for non-fiction, and he was a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Visiting Writer Fellow. He is currently at work on a novel, "The Book of Wisdom," and a work of non-fiction, "The Bondage Hypothesis: Meditations on Race and History."

"The Chaneysville Incident," winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction and a nominee for the American Book Award, was named one of the best books of the year in 1981 by the New York Times, which called the novel "beautifully rendered and wildly adventurous."

The Christian Science Monitor said that "This celebrated novel about a black man’s search for his past rivals Toni Morrison’s ‘Song of Solomon’ as the best novel about the Black experience in America since Ellison’s ‘Invisible Man.’"

For more information, contact the UO Creative Writing Program, (541) 346-0544.

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