February 6, 2004 SELINSGROVE, (Pa.) – Award-winning nonfiction writer Ted Conover will read from his work at Susquehanna University on Monday, Feb. 23. The reading will begin at 7:30 p.m. in Isaacs Auditorium of Seibert Hall. The event is free and open to the public. Conover calls his work “participatory journalism,” in which he deeply involves himself in various situations. Before writing Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, Conover worked as a prison guard in New York’s maximum security state prison. In Coyotes he crossed the border illegally with undocumented Mexicans. For Rolling Nowhere he hopped aboard freight trains to live with America’s hobos. He watched the wealthy people of Aspen with a comic eye before writing Whiteout. Conover says of himself, “I like writing where the writer has something at stake; where he doesn't depend too heavily on experts, but rather has had time to think and research and transform himself into an expert; where his caring and the urgency of the subject can transform the writing into something that matters, an act of witnessing.” Conover won the 2001 National Book Critics Award for Newjack, which was also a Pulitzer Prize Finalist. He has written for the New York Times magazine and The New Yorker. Conover is the fifth of eight writers scheduled to read at Susquehanna during the 2003-2004 school year as part of the Visiting Writers Series, sponsored by the Susquehanna University Writers’ Institute. On March 22, fiction writer Dan Chaon will visit the university. Contact: Victoria Kidd 570-372-4119 #vk/1668#