Poet Mary Ann Samyn and writer Mark Brazaitis, both faculty members at West Virginia University, will read from their work at 8 p.m. Wednesday, April 21, in Room 2W16 of the Memorial Student Center on Marshall University’s Huntington campus. Their appearance is sponsored by the Marshall Visiting Writers Series.
A writer and poet, Brazaitis is the author of An American Affair, winner of the 2004 George Garrett Prize for fiction, as well as The River of Lost Voices: Stories from Guatemala, winner of the 1998 Iowa Short Fiction Award. …

Dr. Chris Green, associate professor of English at Marshall University, has won a 2009 Weatherford Award for his book The Social Life of Poetry: Appalachia, Race, and Radical Modernism (Palgrave Macmillan).
The Weatherford Award for nonfiction is given annually to a work that “best illuminates the challenges, personalities, and unique qualities of the Appalachian South.”
“The conferring of this annual award has come to be recognized as a major Appalachian event,” notes the award’s Web site.  Past winners include The Encyclopedia of Appalachia, Homer Hickam’s Rocket Boys: A Memoir, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Colored People: A …