Author Author John D’Agata at Writers Reading Feb. 3

PELLA — Author John D’Agata is second in Central College’s spring 2011 Writers Reading series Thursday, Feb. 3. D’Agata will read from his novel About a Mountain in Geisler Library Reading Room at 7:30 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.

Part social commentary, part literary nonfiction, part memoir, About a Mountain is set in Las Vegas in the summer of 2002, were D’Agata has just arrived to help his mother resettle. He is witness to two events: the vote in the U.S. Senate on July 9 to approve a national nuclear waste storage facility at Yucca Mountain; and the suicide of sixteen-year-old Levi Walton Presley, who jumped from the observation platform of the Stratosphere Hotel on the Vegas strip.

D’Agata is the editor of The Next American Essay, an anthology of innovative nonfiction. It is the first in a projected 3-volume study of the history of alternative forms of the essay. He has been the editor of lyric essays at the Seneca Review for the past 12 years and currently  is a member of the nonfiction writing program faculty at the University of Iowa.

Central College received a grant from Humanities Iowa, the state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities, to support the Geisler Library Writers Reading spring 2011 series. This is the seventh year that Humanities Iowa has chosen to support this program. The Geisler Library Writers Reading series was established in 1987 to promote an appreciation of books and their authors and features locally, nationally and internationally known writers reading and discussing their works.