News Release

Poet Beth Ann Fennelly and novelist Tom Franklin will present a joint reading hosted by the Writing Seminars at The Johns Hopkins University at 6 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 27, in Shaffer Hall, Room 3, on the university's Homewood campus, 3400 N. Charles St. in Baltimore. The event is free and open to the public.

Beth Ann Fennelly's first book, Open House, won the 2001 Kenyon Review Prize and was a BookSense Top Ten poetry pick. Her second book, Tender Hooks, was published by Norton in 2004. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and she was Diane Middlebrook Fellow at the University of Wisconsin. Fennelly is an assistant professor of English at the University of Mississippi.

Tom Franklin is the author of Poachers: Stories, Hell at the Breech, and Smonk. His stories have appeared in The Black Warrior Review, The Southern Review, and The Oxford American, as well as in Best American Mystery Stories of the Century, New Stories from The South, 1999, and Stories from the Blue Moon Café. Winner of a 2001 Guggenheim Fellowship, he teaches in the University of Mississippi's MFA program.

Brief biographical information for Fennelly and Franklin, who are married and live with their two children in Oxford, Miss., is available online at www.olemiss.edu/depts/english/people/professors/bios/fen nelly_beth-ann.html and www.olemiss.edu/depts/english/people/professors/bios/ franklin_tom_main.html. For information about the event, contact Douglas Basford at dbasford@jhu.edu or (410) 516-6139.