November 20, 2003 SELINSGROVE, (Pa.) – Associate Professor of English Tom Bailey describes himself as “a fiction writer with a Ph.D.” and, in so doing, not only affirms his academic accomplishments but also his recent success as a short story writer and novelist. But don’t take his word for it. Take it from the well-known authors and critics who have endorsed his third published book, Crow Man, a collection of short stories from which he’ll read on Thursday, Dec. 4, in Meeting Rooms 1-3 of Susquehanna University’s Degenstein Campus Center. The reading, which begins at 7:30 p.m., is free and open to the public. Jayne Anne Phillips, author of Black Tickets, Shelter, and Motherkind, calls the collection “masculine, elegant, uncompromising and country-real.” “Tom Bailey reinvents rite of passage, love, heartbreak, blood feuds and hot weather. Read Bailey for his fine prose, his clear unforgiving eye, his New South wisdom, and for the pure excitement of discovering a writer who’s arrived,” Phillips says. Published by Etruscan Press and titled after one of the 11 stories in the collection, Crow Man takes readers from the Adirondack Mountains to the hollows of West Virginia and the Mississippi Delta. But no matter what the setting, these quintessentially American stories fully demonstrate our unstinting capacity for love and loss. As Robert Coles, founder of DoubleTake magazine and author of The Call of Stories and Flannery O’Connor’s South, puts it: “Here are vivid affecting moments in American life carefully, poignantly rendered by a storyteller whose eyes and ears miss little – his words help us -understand ourselves (our ways of being, our worries and yearnings), and too, help us become more alertly knowing observers of others.” C. Michael Curtis of The Atlantic Monthly says, “Tom Bailey’s characters live in a world of deceptive simplicity. They move from job to job and in and out of prison, struggle to understand loving attachment, make crucial misjudgments, defend what they believe are manly virtues, and absorb deep disappointments. They hunt, shoot, drink, and fight, while cultivating an appetite for moral ambiguity that elevates these stories and wins our respect for their author.” Other words of respect for Bailey’s work come from Joyce Carol Oates who calls the collection “richly imagined and sensitively crafted stories of loss, mystery, hurt and unexpected redemption.” Andre Dubus III, author of the best-selling novel, House of Sand and Fog, admires “the heart, the range, the compassion and the hard-earned wisdom” of Bailey’s work. The core stories contained in Crow Man have earned Bailey a Newhouse Award from the John Gardner Foundation, “The Distinguished Dissertation Award for the Humanities” from Binghamton University, and a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship for Fiction. His novel, “The Grace That Keeps This World,” will be published by Etruscan Press in the fall of 2004. He has just completed his third novel, titled The Lynching of Letitia Johnson. Bailey, who teaches creative writing for The Writers’ Institute in Susquehanna University’s Department of English and Creative Writing, held the Winifred and Gustave Weber Professorship in the Humanities from 1999-2001. Prior to joining Susquehanna’s faculty, Bailey taught in the Expository Writing Program at Harvard University and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is the author of A Short Story Writer’s Companion (2001) and the editor of On Writing Short Stories (2000), both from Oxford University Press. His work has been widely published in literary journals, including Doubletake, and won a Pushcart Prize, one of the most prestigious awards given to a fiction writer. Bailey’s stories have also been anthologized in New Stories from the South and cited in The Best American Short Stories. Contact: Victoria Kidd 570-372-4119 #vk/1198#