Fiction Writer Tina Hall Reading at Penn State Behrend April 14, 2011

Fiction writer Tina Hall, winner of the 2010 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, will read in Penn State Behrend’s Creative Writer’s Speaker Series on Thursday, April 14.

Hall’s reading begins at 6 p.m. in the college’s Larry and Kathryn Smith Chapel. A reception for her will be held one-half hour prior to the reading; both events are free and open to the public. Free parking will be available at the college’s Junker Center.

Hall’s collection of short stories, The Physics of Imaginary Objects, was chosen from a field of nearly 350 entries for the Heinz Prize, one of the nation’s most prestigious literary awards. Drue Heinz, widow of H.J. Heinz, sponsors the competition, which began in 1981.

The Physics of Imaginary Objects is a “miscellany of sorts, or a cabinet of curiosities,” Hall says. “The stories test how language determines being, how the body and words interact, how story can be tactical rather than strategic, and how the familiar might be made strange. What ties them all together, I hope, is the sense that just around the next indent, anything can happen.”

Hall’s novella, All the Day’s Sad Stories, was published in 2009 by Caketrain Press. Her fiction has appeared in such journals as 3rd Bed, Quarterly West, Black Warrior Review and Descant, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize three times.

Penn State Behrend’s annual Creative Writer’s Speaker Series is produced by the college’s B.F.A. in Creative Writing degree program with support from the Clarence A. and Eugenie Baumann Smith Fund.

For more information about the series, phone the Penn State Behrend School of Humanities and Social Sciences at 814-898-6108.