The Jack Ridl Visiting Writers Series of Hope College will feature fiction writer Cristina Garcia on Thursday, Oct. 14, at 7 p.m. at the Knickerbocker Theatre in downtown Holland.

The public is invited. Admission is free.

She will be featured in a live interview on campus radio station WTHS (89.9 FM) on Thursday, Oct. 14, at 11:15 a.m.  She will participate in a question-and-answer session, also open to the public, on Thursday, Oct. 14, at 3 p.m. in the Herrick Room of the DeWitt Center.

Cristina Garcia is the author of five novels: "Dreaming in Cuban," "The Agüero Sisters," "Monkey Hunting," "A Handbook to Luck" and "The Lady Matador's Hotel," just published by Scribner. García has edited two anthologies, "Cubanísimo: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Cuban Literature" and "Bordering Fires: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Mexican and Chicano/a Literature." Two works for young readers, "The Dog Who Loved the Moon" and "I Wanna Be Your Shoebox," were published in 2008.  A collection of poetry, "The Lesser Tragedy of Death," was recently published by Akashic Books.

García's work has been nominated for a National Book Award and translated into a dozen languages. She has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers' Award, a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University and an NEA grant, among others. She is the former artistic director for the Centrum Writers' Exchange in Port Townsend, Wash., and has taught literature and writing at numerous universities. This fall, she is a visiting professor at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas-Austin. She has also accepted a permanent position with Texas Tech University as a professor of creative writing and will teach there every spring semester starting in 2011.

Additional information about the Jack Ridl Visiting Writers Series may be obtained online by going to www.hope.edu/vws.

A performance by a Hope jazz group will precede the reading beginning at 6:30 p.m.  The Knickerbocker Theatre is located at 86 E. Eighth St.