University of Houston Libraries invites the public to the next Poetry and Prose reading on Wednesday, February 19. UH Creative Writing Program faculty will be featured. The readings will begin at 5:30 p.m. in the Honors College Commons, MD Anderson Library. Light refreshments will be provided.

Robert Boswell has published seven novels, three story collections, two books of nonfiction, and has had two plays produced. His work has earned him two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Iowa School of Letters Award for Fiction, a Lila Wallace/Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, the PEN West Award for Fiction, the John Gassner Prize for Playwriting, and the Evil Companions Award. He has published more than 70 stories and essays in places such as The New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, Pushcart Prize Stories, Esquire, Colorado Review, Epoch, Ploughshares, and in many other magazines and anthologies. He holds the Cullen Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Houston.

francine j. harris was born in Detroit, Michigan. She earned a BA in English from Arizona State University in 1997 and an MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan in 2011 , where she was awarded a Zell Fellowship. She is the author of Here Is the Sweet Hand (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2020), play dead (2016), and allegiance (2012), a finalist for both the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the PEN Open Book Award. Her poetry has appeared in many journals, including McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, Poetry, Meridian, Indiana Review, Callaloo, and Boston Review. A 2008 Cave Canem fellow, she has also won the 2014 Boston Review Annual Poetry Contest and was awarded a 2015 NEA fellowship. harris was writer in residence at Washington University in St. Louis and taught creative writing at University of Michigan and Centre College in Danville, Kentucky. She is currently associate professor of English at the University of Houston.