Live music by the Hope College Jazz Chamber
  Ensemble will precede the reading beginning at 6:30 p.m.
          The public is invited.  Admission is free.
          Luis Rodriguez, best known for his memoir "Always
  Running:  La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A." (1993), speaks
  around the world to campuses and communities with standing-
  room only audiences.
          He bases his nonfiction and poetry on past
  experiences as a teenage gangbanger.  By the time he was 18,
  he had lost 25 of his friends and family to suicide, murder
  and other acts of senseless violence.  He began his own
  memoir as a 16-year-old, and was motivated to complete it as
  his own son joined a gang in Chicago, Ill.
          "Always Running" won the Carl Sandburg Literary
  Award, and has also been recognized with a Lila Wallace-
  Reader's Digest Writer's Award, a Chicago Sun-Times Book
  Award, and several other fellowships and prizes.  Rodriguez
  lives in Chicago as a peacemaker among inner city gangs, as
  he runs "Tia Church Press," which publishes emerging,
  socially conscious poets.
          Susan Atefat Peckham is in her first year as a
  member of the Hope faculty, teaching creative writing as an
  assistant professor of English.  Her own writing is flavored
  by her diverse background.  She was born first-generation
  American to Iranian parents, and has lived most of her life
  in France and Switzerland, although she has also lived for
  periods in Iran as well as the United States.
          Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in "The
  International Poetry Review," "International Quarterly,"
  "The Literary Review," "The MacGuffin," "Onthebus," "Prairie
  Schooner," "Puerto Del Sol," "The Southern Poetry Review,"
  "The Sycamore Review" and "The Texas Review."  She will be
  anthologized next year in "In A Field of Words" (Prentice
  Hall), and has been the recipient of various fellowships and
  awards.
          She was previously at the University of Nebraska,
  where she earned her doctorate and taught creative writing,
  literature and composition.  She also served as an editorial
  assistant for "Prairie Schooner Literary Magazine."

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