New visiting writer series

Jonathan Franzen, winner of the 2001 National Book Award for his novel, "The Corrections," will give a public reading on Dec. 3 at Fresno State . Franzen will speak at 7 p.m. in the Alice Peters Auditorium, inside the Peters Business Building , 5245 N. Backer Ave.

This event inaugurates the San Joaquin Literary Association's new Visiting Writer Series. The series aims to attract writers and literary figures from across the publishing world to reinforce the importance of literature within the university community. Admission is free.

The reading will be followed by a question-answer session to be moderated by Fresno State professor and novelist Steve Yarbrough. A reception and book signing will close the evening.

Franzen is one of the most popular and polarizing figures in publishing today. Shortly after "The Corrections" won the National Book Award, he was named one of the Twenty Writers for the 21st century by The New Yorker magazine. This event is hosted by the San Joaquin Literary Association (SJLA) and the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at Fresno State . The SJLA is a student organization comprising graduate students in the M.F.A. and M.A. programs, with the intention of working to create significant literary events on campus.

Franzen was born near Chicago in 1959 and grew up in a suburb of St. Louis , Mo. After graduating from Swarthmore College in 1981 he studied at the Freie Universität in Berlin as a Fulbright scholar and later worked in a seismology lab at Harvard University 's Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences.

He is the author of three novels - "The Twenty-Seventh City" (1988), "Strong Motion" (1992), and "The Corrections" (2001) - and a collection of essays, "How to Be Alone" (2002). In addition to the National Book Award, his honors include a Whiting Writers Award in 1988, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1996, the American Academy 's Berlin Prize in 2000.

He writes frequently for The New Yorker, and he lives in New York City .