KINGSTON, R.I. — October 20, 2008 — The University of Rhode Island English Department READ/WRITE annual reading series continues on Thursday, Oct. 23 from 4 to 6 p.m. with scholar-poet-fiction writer Dennis Barone. Barone is a professor of English and director of the American Studies Program at Saint Joseph College in West Hartford, Conn. Free and open to the public, the reading will be held in Hoffmann Room 154, Swan Hall (formerly Independence Hall), 60 Upper College Road, Kingston. A discussion and reception will follow.

Barone is the author of three books of short fiction: Abusing the Telephone (1994), The Returns (1996), and Echoes (1997), winner of the America Award. He is also the author of two novellas, Temple of the Rat (2000) and God’s Whisper (2005). Precise Machine, a hybrid-work of memoir, prose poetry, and short fiction was recently published by Quale Press; a second mixed-genre work, North Arrow, is forthcoming in 2008.

He is editor of Beyond the Red Notebook: Essays on Paul Auster (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), a collection of short prose pieces, The Walls of Circumstance (2004), and a selected poetry, Separate Objects (1998). His essays on American literature and culture have appeared in American Studies, Critique, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Review of Contemporary Fiction, and Voices in Italian Americana.

A graduate of Bard College, he received his Ph.D. in American Civilization from the University of Pennsylvania in 1984, and in 1992 he held the Thomas Jefferson Chair, a distinguished Fulbright lecturing award, in the Netherlands.

The series will continue on Thursday, Nov. 13, 5 to 7p.m. with Poet Mairead Byrne from the Rhode Island School of Design and fiction writer Renee Gladman of Brown University. More details on this event will follow.

For more information, call 401.874.5931.