Munoz to Read at UW

Oct. 13, 2008 -- Manuel Munoz, an award-winning author of two collections of short stories, will read from his work "The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue" at 5 p.m. Monday, Oct. 27, at the University of Wyoming Foundation House at 1200 East Ivinson Street. The reading, free and open to the public, will be followed by a book signing and reception.

During the visit to UW, sponsored by the UW M.F.A. Program's Visiting Writers Series and the Chicano Studies Program, Munoz will meet with undergraduate and graduate students and visit university classes. At noon Tuesday, Oct. 28, he will be the guest of a Chicano Studies-sponsored book club devoted to his writing in Room 203 of the Wyoming Union.

Critics have praised the "delicacy and power" of his stories, which draw on his own experiences growing up in the impoverished Mexican-American communities of California's Central Valley. His work has been celebrated for its frank, sensitive portrayals of gay Chicano identity. Critics have called his latest collection "moving and tender," "wildly talented" and "muted, intimate, and masterfully restrained."

"It's a strange place: rural, conservative, impoverished, and fraught with a deep racial tension," Munoz says of his fiction's setting in the Central Valley. "Most of my characters are at odds with the Valley's strict, unspoken restrictions."

A native of Dinuba, Calif., Munoz graduated from Harvard University and received his M.F.A. in creative writing at Cornell University. He is now an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Arizona.

A finalist for the 2007 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Prize, he received a Constance Saltonstall Foundation Individual Artist's Grant in Fiction, a National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship and a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in 2008.

Each semester, The M.F.A. in Creative Writing Program brings distinguished writers and emerging new voices to Wyoming. Munoz's visit is also part of The Chicano Studies Program's slate of events for Hispanic Heritage Month. Chicano Studies will distribute a limited number of free copies of Munoz's work to prepare for the book club's discussion.

For more information about Munoz's reading, visit the M.F.A. Web site at www.uwyo.edu/creativewriting. For information about the book club and Hispanic Heritage Month, visit the Chicano Studies Web site at www.uwyo.edu/chicanostudies.

Photo:
Award-winning author Manuel Munoz.

Posted on Monday, October 13, 2008

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