WVU Press to Host Fiction Readings
by Two West Virginia Authors Sept 12

Morgantown, WV, September 1, 2006: Vandalia Press, the literary imprint of West Virginia University Press, invites the public to join its staff on Tuesday, September 12, 2006, at 7:00 p.m. in the Betty Boyd Lounge of E. Moore Hall on WVU's downtown campus for a reading and book signing by its new fiction authors, Priscilla A. Rodd and Kevin Oderman.

Priscilla A. Rodd will read from her new novel, Surviving Mae West, which was published by Vandalia Press in June 2006, and Kevin Oderman will read from Going, which was released by Vandalia on August 15.

Tess, the protagonist/narrator of Surviving Mae West, is a young West Virginia woman haunted by the trauma of a brutal rape. The novel opens on the day that Tess begins working as a prostitute in a New York City brothel, although her family believes she's a waitress in a Mexican restaurant. Rodd's novel employs a journal format, a structure that allows Tess to emerge with utter candor and realism as readers become privy to her secrets. Readers sink into Tess's complex inner world where intimacy is both dreaded and desired.

Kevin Oderman, professor of English and creative writing at WVU, is the author of many highly regarded literary personal and travel essays. His essay collection, How Things Fit Together, won the Bakeless Prize for Nonfiction in 1999, and was published by the University Press of New England.

Heir to a tradition of literary expat novels that includes works by Ernest Hemingway and Lawrence Durrell, Going combines a love story and an intrigue in a narrative of surprising twists that illuminate the moral quandaries faced by the main characters.

Going opens in Granada, where a boy in a dress is begging in the white alleys of the old town. A runaway and vulnerable, he turns for protection to an American painter and poet. Although the two adults mean to help the boy, they unwittingly expose him to more peril in the form of two unscrupulous Americans dealing in black-market Andalusian antiquities. Soon, all the characters in the story have been scraped on the touchstone of hard realities and made to show their mettle, be it base or gold.

Vandalia Press is the literary imprint of WVU Press, specializing in contemporary poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Begun in 2001, Vandalia publishes one or two literary titles each year by regional writers or by other authors whose work has a strong connection to Appalachia or West Virginia. Among Vandalia's authors are Richard Currey, Lee Maynard, and West Virginia Poet Laureate Irene McKinney. For more information on WVU Press titles, visit the Press Web site at www.wvupress.com.

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