Author Robert Morgan will present the final reading of the fall semester at WRITERS IN THE LIBRARY Monday, November 14, at 7 p.m., in UT’s Hodges Library auditorium. The reading is free and open to the public.

Morgan is the author of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Two titles published this year demonstrate the breadth of his talent: Through portraits of influential Americans from Thomas Jefferson to Kit Carson, Lions of the West: Heroes and Villains of the Westward Expansion tells the story of the American conquest of the West. The poems in his new collection, Terroir, explore memory, family narratives, and the natural world. “Readers of Morgan’s fiction will recognize many places, themes, and voices, while fans of his poetry will see a fresh energy in poems drawing on science and folklore, Native American history, and music.”

His acclaimed novel Gap Creek won a Southern Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and was chosen Book of the Year for 2000 by the Appalachian Writers Association. Gap Creek was both a New York Times bestseller and a selection of the Oprah Book Club. Morgan has also proved to be an accomplished biographer. His Boone: A Biography has been praised for stripping away the myth to reveal the complex character of the legendary frontiersman.

Morgan is Kappa Alpha Professor of English at Cornell University and has been visiting writer-in-residence at half a dozen universities. His awards include Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships, the James G. Hanes Poetry Prize from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and an Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature. He was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in 2010.

Read a review of Lions of the West on Chapter 16: a community of Tennessee writers, readers and passersby (brought to you by Humanities Tennessee).

Writers in the Library is sponsored by the University of Tennessee Libraries and the UT Department of English. For further information contact Marilyn Kallet, Director, UT Creative Writing Program (mkallet@utk.edu), or Jeff Daniel Marion, Writer in Residence, UT Libraries (dannymar@earthlink.net).