UCA writing professor to present reading at Clinton Center

UCA assistant professor of writing Garry Craig Powell will give a public reading of his works in the Great Hall of the Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock on Sunday, March 1 at 3 p.m.

The event is free and open to the public.

Powell also recently had a story selected for Best American Mystery Stories 2009, which will be published by Houghton Mifflin. The story, titled “Kamila and the King of Kandy,” first appeared in last year’s Red Wheelbarrow Literary Magazine.Powell, an Englishman whose teaching specialties include creative writing, especially fiction and nonfiction, has lived for long periods in the Middle East and southern Europe.

“What do I enjoy most about writing? That’s a bit like asking what I most enjoy about life,” Powell said. “I like to order my experience, to find meaning and beauty in it; I enjoy creating people who have never existed and watching them take on lives of their own, that seem as real to me as the lives of people I’ve actually known.”

Powell will read from his short stories “Kamila and the King of Kandy” and “Sentence,” which appeared in Canadian magazine Queen’s Quarterly and the New York magazine Lilies and Cannonballs Review in 2005.

Versions of both stories will be found as chapters in Powell