EUGENE–Ehud Havazelet, the most recent recipient of the Oregon Book Award for fiction, and novelist Grace Talusan will give a joint reading on Tuesday, Jan. 18, at the University of Oregon as part of the Creative Writing Program Writing Series.

The reading, free and open to the public, will begin at 8 p.m. in the Browsing Room of the Knight Library, 1501 Kincaid St. A book signing will follow.

"Like Never Before," Havazelet’s second collection of short stories, earned him the 1999 H.L. Davis Award for fiction in the Oregon Book Awards. Both the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times had called his collection of connected stories one of the best books of 1998, and the Oregonian called it the best regional book of the year.

Havazelet, the director of fiction for the acclaimed UO Creative Writing Program, is a graduate of Columbia University and the famed Iowa Writer’s Workshop. He has published fiction in such notable literary journals as DoubleTake, The Southern Review and The New England Review.

The winner of several other awards, Havazelet received in 1999 a Whiting Fellowship, an award given by a secret literary committee that recognizes a small group of nationally significant writers each year. Early in his writing career, he also received a distinguished Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University.

Talusan, a recent graduate of the fiction writing program at the University of California at Irvine, received an Oregon Humanities Center research grant to spend time in the Philippines researching her novel-in-progress, "Like Any American Girl." The reading will be first public appearance in Eugene for Talusan, this year’s visiting writer in fiction at the UO Creative Writing Program.

In February, the Creative Writing Reading Series will continue with a reading by Distinguished Visiting Professor David Bradley, author of "The Chaneysville Incident." Bradley’s reading is scheduled for Thursday, Feb. 17, in the UO Knight Library Browsing Room.

For more information, call Debra Gwartney, assistant director of the UO Creative Writing Program, (541) 346-0544, or send e-mail to gwartney@oregon.uoregon.edu.

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