FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Two distinguished figures in the world of American arts and letters will visit the University of Arkansas campus on March 8 as guests of the English Department and the Southern Studies Program.

Marshall Bruce Gentry, an alumnus of the University of Arkansas and now professor of English at Georgia College and State University, will talk on “Flannery O’Connor and the Substitute Child” at 3:30 p.m. Tuesday, March 8, in Science and Engineering room 403. Gentry is the author of Flannery O’Connor’s Religion of the Grotesque and editor of the Flannery O’Connor Review. He has received two National Endowment of the Humanities grants to lead summer seminars on O’Connor and has directed four national conferences on her work.

Alice Friman, poet-in-residence at Georgia College and State University, will read from her poetry from 1 to 2 p.m. in Kimpel 203, also on March 8. Friman’s fifth full-length collection of poetry is Vinculum, published by LSU Press, for which she won the 2012 Georgia Author of the Year Award for Poetry. She received a 2012 Pushcart Prize, and her work was included in The Best American Poetry of 2009. An early book, Zoo, was published by the University of Arkansas Press. It won the Sheila Margaret Motton Prise from the New England Poetry Club and the Ezra Pound Poetry Award from Truman State College.

The public is welcome at both the poetry reading and the O’Connor lecture.