The Jack Ridl Visiting Writers Series of Hope College will feature fiction writer Lewis Nordan and essayist David Griffith on Thursday, Feb. 21, at 7 p.m. at the Knickerbocker Theatre.
There will be a question-and-answer discussion with Nordan and Griffith in the Otte Room of Phelps Hall on Thursday, Feb. 21, from 3 to 4 p.m.
The public is invited to both events. Admission is free.
Southern writer Nordan is the author of a memoir, three short story collections, and four novels, including Southern Book Award winner "Wolf Whistle," based on the murder of Emmett Till, which occurred near Nordan's Mississippi hometown in 1955 when the author was 15 years old. Critics often compare Nordan to William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor, and "Publishers Weekly" calls him "one of the best contemporary writers to portray [the South's] people," noting that he "does so with tenderness and compassion, in prose that rises and falls like plangent music."
Griffith earned his MFA in creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh, where he was taught and mentored by Lewis Nordan. Griffith is the author of "A Good War is Hard to Find," a collection of essays in which, according to "Dead Man Walking" author Sister Helen Prejean, he "offers gripping personal testimony to the difficulties of living out the Christian imperatives of love and forgiveness amid a culture that legitimizes government violence as the only 'real' way to establish social order."
Additional information may be obtained online by visiting www.hope.edu/vws.
Phelps Hall is located at 154 E. 10th St. The Knickerbocker Theatre is located at 86 E. Eighth St.