The U of A Program in Creative Writing and Translation in the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences is proud to welcome Patrick Cottrell and Sarah Gerard as its 2021-22 Walton Visiting Writers in Fiction.

Patrick and Sarah will give a virtual reading of their work on Tuesday, Feb. 22, at 7 p.m. in collaboration with the program and the Fayetteville Public Library.

 A link to register for the free public event can be found on the library's website at  https://www.faylib.org/event/6054333.

Cottrell is the author of Sorry to Disrupt the Peace (McSweeney's). He is a winner of a Whiting Award in fiction and a Barnes and Noble Discover Award. His work has been translated into Korean, Italian, French and is forthcoming in Turkish. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, Burrow Press, Bomb Magazine, Granta and other places. Most recently, he guest edited a special queer fiction issue of Mcsweeney's Quarterly. He lives in Denver where he teaches at University of Denver in the English and Literary Arts Program. 

Gerard's essay collection Sunshine State was a New York Times Editors Choice, a finalist for the Southern Book Prize and was long-listed for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. Her novel Binary Star was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and was a best-book-of-the-year at NPR, Vanity Fair and BuzzFeed. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, T Magazine, Granta, Guernica, The Baffler, The Believer, Vice, Electric Literature and several anthologies. She was the 2018-2019 New College of Florida Writer-in-Residence and winner of a Lambda Literary Jim Duggins Prize. She lives with her partner, the writer Patrick Cottrell.

Each year, the Walton Visiting Writers series in the Program in Creative Writing and Translation brings esteemed authors in poetry, fiction and literary translation to the U of A to give free public readings and to work with graduate students in the creative writing M.F.A. program.

Past Walton Writers include Natalie Diaz, Chris Abani, Caryl Phillips, Franz Wright, Esther Allen and Karen Tei Yamashita.

This event is made possible by the Program in Creative Writing and Translation, the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, the Department of English, the Walton Family Foundation, the Fayetteville Public Library and the James E. and Ellen Wadley Roper Professorship in Creative Writing.