Award Winning Novelist, Richard Ford, Reads at SSU Feb. 17

SALISBURY, MD---Salisbury State University hosts acclaimed writer and novelist Richard Ford, who will read from his new fiction on Thursday, February 17, at 7:30 p.m. in the Wicomico Room of the Guerrieri University Center on campus.

As part of the "Writers on the Shore" lecture series, Ford's reading is sponsored by SSU's English Department, Cultural Affairs Council and the Charles R. and Martha N. Fulton School of Liberal Arts and is free and open to the public.

Ford, considered one of America's finest writers, previously read at SSU in April 1988. Critics have praised him for providing both "the pleasures of narrative and the sad wisdom of art" (New York Times). The Washington Post calls him, "A Babe Ruth of novelists, excelling at every part of the game." Ford's last novel, Independence Day (1995), was an international best seller and the only novel ever to win both the Pen/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

In the three stories that make up his most recent collection of short fiction, Women with Men (1997), Ford takes readers from the streets of Paris to the plains of Montana to the suburbs of Chicago, capturing men and women at their most essential and complex moments. In their quest for both privacy and intimacy, Ford's characters struggle through infidelity, estrangement and betrayal. As Publisher's Weekly wrote, "Ford is a writer whose directness of utterance and keen eye is combined with a remarkably subtle sense of human comedy, all qualities exemplified here."

Ford received his bachelor's degree from Michigan State University and his Master of Fine Arts from the University of California, Irvine. He has taught writing at Princeton University, Williams College, the University of Michigan and Northwestern University.

Ford is the author of five novels, Independence Day, Wildlife (1990), The Sportswriter (1986), The Ultimate Good Luck(1981) and A Piece of My Heart (1976), and a collection of short- stories, Rock Springs (1987). He lives in New Orleans with his wife, Kristina. For more information, please contact SSU's Public Relations Office at 410-543-6030.