Kansas author opens writers series

  Thursday, August 27, 2015 2:00 AM
  News

Pittsburg, KS

Southeast Kansas author Lori Baker Martin will read from her novel in-progress, “Bitter Water,” at 8 p.m. on Thursday, September 3, in the Governors Room of the Overman Student Center on the Pittsburg State University campus. Martin’s visit is the first event in the 2015-2016 PSU Distinguished Visiting Writers Lecture Series, which is sponsored by the PSU Department of English and Modern Languages.

“Bitter Water” is set in pre-Civil-War Missouri, in the Duneweg area.

According to the author, “The plot hinges on a missing woman and involves passion, greed, murder, a forest fire, Ozarks witchcraft, ghosts, and a mule that serves as a Greek chorus of one—plus general mayhem.”

Martin, a Kansas native, was a student in the graduate fiction program at PSU before being accepted into the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she earned her MFA. She is currently an assistant professor of creative writing in PSU’s Department of English and Modern Languages.

Martin has published poetry and fiction in magazines like The Little Balkans Review, Room Magazine, The Knicknackery, Midwest Quarterly, and Kansas Time + Place, 150 Kansas Poets. She has work upcoming in The Iowa Review. Most recently, Martin taught creative writing at Independence Community College. She has worked as a reader for both The Iowa Review and NPR, and she was honored for her work in The Cincinnati Review and Kansas Voices. At the Iowa Writers’ Workshop she was named a Truman Capote Fellow and received the Clark Fisher Ansley Award for Excellence in Fiction.

Martin’s presentation is free and open to the public. For more information, call the PSU Department of English and Modern Languages at 620-235-4689.