Press Releases

Winfield, Kan., March 25, 2002 — Author Thomas Fox Averill will be on the Southwestern College campus April 10 and 11 to conduct a fiction writing workshop and to present a reading of his fiction. Both offerings are open to the public without charge.

His fiction writing workshop will be held Wednesday, April 10, from 2 to 4 p.m. in Wroten Hall. The public reading will be Wednesday, April 10, at 7:30 p.m. in Darbeth Rehearsal Hall.

No preregistration is necessary. Participants may attend one or both of the presentations.

Averill is writer-in-residence and professor of English at Washburn University in Topeka where he teaches courses in creative writing and in Kansas literature, folklore, and film. He is author of dozens of published short stories in numerous literary magazines including Doubletake, Cimarron Review, New Letters, Greensboro Review, Kansas Quarterly, Louisville Review, and the Radcliffe Culinary Times.

In 1993, he received the Kansas Governor’s Arts Award in Creative Writing. He has won additional awards and distinctions for his writing on topics from cooking haggis to flying over Kansas to gardening to Kansas art. He has been a first prize winner in the Kansas Voices competition sponsored by the Winfield Arts and Humanities Council.

“Averill works with writers at all levels to help improve their skills in the techniques of fiction writing as well as the process of generating possibilities for stories,” says Troy Boucher, SC professor of English. “The skills that Tom teaches will benefit any writer regardless of what their interests are or what level they have attained or would like to attain.”

Also an award-winning commentator, Averill is the voice of fictional Williams Jennings Bryan Oleander of Here, Kan., and is featured on KANU National Public Radio from the University of Kansas. His most recent work, a novel, is “Secrets of the Tsil Café.” (New York: BlueHen/Putnam, 2001)

For more information on Averill’s fiction writing presentations at Southwestern College, call Boucher at (620) 229-6291.