By Karen Chambless

Denise Giardina will be the next author to read at Lee University’s Writer’s Festival on Tuesday, March 22 at 7 p.m. The reading will take place in the Rose Lecture Hall, located in Lee’s Helen DeVos College of Education.

Giardina is the author of a number of novels including “Saints and Villains” which is about the noted theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the plot to assassinate Hitler. The book won the Boston Book Review Fiction Prize and was a semi-finalist for the International Dublin Literary Award.

“Denise Giardina exemplifies great writing, especially about the Appalachian region,” said Dr. Kevin Brown, professor of English at Lee. “We are looking forward to students getting the chance to hear from an author who writes about people they know.”

Giardina is the recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship and also won the American Book Award and the Lillian Smith Award.

A passionate activist and environmentalist, she is an ordained deacon in the Episcopal Church and lives in Charleston, West Virginia.

Giardina will also visit Dr. Will Woolfitt’s Advanced Fiction class on Wednesday.

Future Writer’s Festival events include Lee faculty Brown, Stacey Isom Campbell, and Woolfitt on April 4.

Writer’s Festival readings are free, non-ticketed events and open to the public.

For more information on Lee’s Writer’s Festival, please email Brown at [email protected] or call 423-614-8320.