A short story collection that won the Flannery OConner Award for Short Fiction will be featured in a literary reading Thursday (March 13) at West Virginia University.

Gail Galloway Adams, an associate professor in the Department of English at WVU and author ofThe Purchase of Order,will share her latest work at 7:30 p.m. in the Gold Ballroom of WVU s Mountainlair. A reception and book signing will follow. The event is free and open to the public.

In addition to winning the Flannery OConner Award, the collections title story was selected for the Prentice Hall Anthology of Womens Literature.Adamswork has appeared in literary journals such as The Georgia Review, North American Review, Story Quarterly and The Kenyon Review.

Adams serves on the editorial board of Arts&Letters: A Journal of Contemporary Culture, and she is on the permanent faculty of Wildacres WritersWorkshop.

She has received numerous teaching awards, including West Virginia Professor of the Year from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and she is one of the founding members of WVU s Master of Fine Arts in the Creative Writing Program.

Besides creative writing, her fields of interest are Southern literature, literature of the Great Depression and the literary landscape of World War I.