September 18, 2000 SELINSGROVE, Pa. - Cuban-American Cristina Garcia, a former Time magazine bureau chief and reporter turned award-winning fiction writer, will open The Writers' Institute's Visiting Writers Series at Susquehanna University with a reading October 2 at 7:30 p.m. in Degenstein Center Theater. Garcia, whose first book, Dreaming in Cuban, was nominated for a National Book Award in 1992, has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, and the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award. Born in Havana, Garcia was two when her family moved to New York City. She began her career in journalism after attending Columbia University with a job in copy editing at the New York Times. She made her first trip back to Cuba when she was 30. She said in an interview on the Random House Web site, "The Cuban aspect of my identity has, to my surprise, become my wellspring. It is now an indelible, strong, and very visceral part of my identity." The author of The Aguero Sisters, a novel which also details Cuban-American experiences, Garcia is the first of five writers scheduled to read at Susquehanna during the 2000-2001 Visiting Writers Series sponsored by the The Writers' Institute. Other writers in the series include Tom Perrotta, whose novel, Election, was recently made into a motion picture, and Ha Jin, whose novel, Waiting, was nominated for a 2000 Pulitzer Prize. This reading is partially sponsored by the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. For more information, please contact Dr. Gary Fincke, professor of English and director of Susquehanna University's Writers' Institute at (570) 372-4164. Contact: Branden Pfefferkorn/Betse Humphrey 570-372-4119 #bp/bh/290#