October 31, 2007

Writers Harvest features author of the 'Murder, She Wrote' series

Writers Harvest, presented by Purdue's literary journal the Sycamore Review, is 7:30 p.m. Tuesday (Nov. 6) in Matthews Hall Auditorium, Room 210. Donald Bain is the author of more than 90 books, including 33 books in the "Murder, She Wrote" series. Joining Bain will be poets Donald Platt and Mary Leader and memoirist and novelist Bich Minh Nguyen of the Purdue faculty.

This event, sponsored by Sycamore Review, the Department of English and the Creative Writing Program, is open to the public. Voluntary donations of $5 for students and $7 for adults, or five non-perishable food items, are requested. All proceeds will benefit Food Finders, an organization that distributes 3 million pounds of food and supplies to 175 nonprofit agencies in 18 Indiana counties, reaching thousands of hungry Hoosiers and their families every year.

Bain, a Purdue graduate who earned a bachelor's degree in speech in 1957, also has written the best-selling "Coffee, Tea or Me?" series and the autobiographical "Murder HE Wrote: A Successful Writer's Life." His most recent mystery in the "Murder, She Wrote" series, "A Slaying in Savannah," will appear in 2008.

Platt, a professor of English, is the author of three volumes of poetry, "My Father Says Grace," "Fresh Peaches, Fireworks, & Guns" and "Cloud Atlas." His chapbook "Leap Second at the Turn of the Millennium" won the Center for Book Arts Poetry Chapbook Prize and was printed in a fine-press edition by the center. His poems have appeared in many journals, including The Nation, The Paris Review, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Iowa Review and The Southern Review, as well as in The Best American Poetry 2000 and 2006 and The Pushcart Prize XXVII and XXIX (2003 and 2005 editions).

Leader, an associate professor of English, won the National Poetry Series in 1996 for her first book of poems, "Red Signature." Her second volume, "The Penultimate Suitor," won the Iowa Poetry Prize in 2001. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Beloit Poetry Journal, American Poetry Review, Southern Review and other journals. Her poetry has been featured on National Public Radio, both on "Weekend Edition" and on Garrison Keillor's "Writers' Almanac."

Nguyen, an assistant professor of English, is the author of the memoir "Stealing Buddha's Dinner," which won the PEN/Jerard Award from the PEN American Center, and a forthcoming novel, "Short Girls." Nguyen also is co-editor of three anthologies: "30/30: Thirty American Stories from the Last Thirty Years," "I & Eye: Contemporary Creative Nonfiction" and "The Contemporary American Short Story." Her work has been featured on the PBS NewsHour and NPR and has appeared in publications, including Gourmet magazine, The Chicago Tribune, "Dream Me Home Safely: Writers on Growing up in America," and "Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry and Prose."

Media contact: Amy Patterson Neubert, (765) 494-9723, apatterson@purdue.edu

Reading Series coordinator, (765) 448-1021, dtyx@purdue.edu

Porter Shreve, Creative Writing director, (765) 496-1651, pshreve@purdue.edu

Purdue News Service: (765) 494-2096; purduenews@purdue.edu

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