The prolific poet, fiction writer and essayist Kelly Cherry will appear at Brenau University Wednesday, Nov. 12, at a noon reading at Banks Recital Hall in the Burd Center for the Performing Arts and at a 4 p.m. workshop for students at the Writing Center in the university Trustee Library. Both events are free and open to the public.

A graduate of the MFA Writing Program at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, Cherry is the author of 11 works of poetry, eight of fiction, five of nonfiction (criticism, memoir, and essay), and two dramatic translations. Her critically acclaimed poetry collections include the 2007 anthology of new and selected poems, "Hazard and Prospect." In 2009 she is scheduled to publish "A Girl in the Library: On Women Writers and the Writing Life," and a book of poems entitled "The Retreats of Thought."

Cherry is Eudora Welty Professor Emerita of English and Evjue-Bascom Professor Emerita in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She lives with her husband, the novelist Burke Davis III, on a small farm in Halifax, Va.

Cherry appears at Brenau as a 2008 artist on the Georgia Poetry Circuit. For more information, call 770-534-6195.