Author Janet Kauffman to speak for Writing Program Reading Series Feb. 7

Jan. 15, 2008 -- Author, environmentalist and multimedia artist Janet Kauffman will read from her work at 8 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 7, for the Writing Program in Arts & Sciences.

The talk — part of The Writing Program's fall Reading Series — is free and open to the public and takes place in Hurst Lounge, Room 201, Duncker Hall, on the university's Danforth Campus. Duncker Hall is located at the northwest corner of Brookings Quadrangle, near the intersection of Brookings and Hoyt drives. For more information, call (314) 935-7130 or email dschuman@wustl.edu.

Kauffman, who lives on a farm in Hudson, MI, is the author of the forthcoming book Trespassing: Dirt Stories & Field Notes, which combines stories and nonfiction pieces to illustrate the impact of modern factory farms—confined animal feeding operations, or CAFOs—on her rural community.

She is also the author of three novels that make up her Flesh Made Word trilogy: Collaborators (1987), The Body in Four Parts (1993), and Rot (2001). Other books include Five on Fiction (2004), a collection of prose poems, as well as three books of short stories: Characters on the Loose (1997), Obscene Gestures for Women (1988), and Places in the World a Woman Could Walk (1983).

Born in Lancaster, PA, and raised on a tobacco farm, Kauffman teaches at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, where her courses often focus on mixed media projects and imaginative writing, particularly visual/hybrid texts. Her own mixed media work includes a series of recycled plastic hand/books: Telescopic Heavens (1998), This is the House That Jack Built (1999), and Armed Bug-Women and Other Planetary Forces Confront the Lenawee County Road Commission (2000).

Kauffman's numerous honors include a 1997 Michigan Arts Award; Creative Artist Grants from the Michigan Council for the Arts, in 1984 and 1987; a 1985 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship; and a 1983 Rosenthal Award from the American Academy-Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1987 Collaborators was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction.