Ellen Birkett Morris will read from her debut novel, Beware the Tall Grass, winner of the Donald L. Jordan Award for Literary Excellence. “Beware the Tall Grass explores the collision of past and present, courage and fear, and love and death like nothing I’ve read before–a splendid novel. Morris’s first-person protagonists jump off the page. Each of them, like ourselves, must deal with emotional baggage while trying to create a new reality: a family filled with trust and love.”–Sena Jeter Naslund

Ellen Birkett Morris is the author of Lost Girls: Short Stories, winner of the Pencraft Award. Her fiction has appeared in Shenandoah, Antioch Review, Notre Dame Review, and South Carolina Review, among other journals. Morris is a recipient of an Al Smith Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council. She is also the author of Abide and Surrender, poetry chapbooks. Her essays have appeared in Newsweek, AARP’s the Ethel, Oh Reader, and on National Public Radio. She teaches creative writing at The Virginia Piper Center at ASU in Tempe, Arizona and The Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning in Lexington, Kentucky.