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CORVALLIS - Stuart Dybek, a critically acclaimed author of short stories and poems, will read from his work on Friday, Oct. 25, beginning at 7:30 p.m. in the main rotunda of Oregon State University's Valley Library. The event is free and open to the public.

Dybek is the author of two short story collections: "The Coast of Chicago," published by Knopf/Viking, and "Childhood and Other Neighborhoods," Viking/Ecco. He also has written a collection of poems, "Brass Knuckles," published by the University of Pittsburgh Press.

His fiction, poetry and non-fiction have been published in numerous magazines, including The New Yorker, Atlantic, Harper's, Paris Review and others, and translated into numerous languages.

The New York Times Book Review praised Dybek for his skill at "grounding his stories in the city's streets and alleys, in the feel his young children and adolescents have for the neighborhood landscapes of their early years, and then bending his flair for naturalism on an anvil of fantasy, with bizarre results that yet seem utterly consistent with the logic of childhood."

The Los Angeles Times called his work "moving and real and often brilliantly ambitious."

Dybek has taught at Princeton University, the University of Iowa and Western Michigan University. In 1995, he received the PEN/Malamud Prize for achievements in short story writing. He also has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a pair of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Whiting Writers Award, four O. Henry Prizes, and a Pushcart Prize, and his work has been chosen for Best American Short Stories.

Dybek's reading is the first event in the 2002-03 OSU Visiting Writers Series. It is jointly sponsored by the OSU Department of English, the Valley Library, and the Office of the Provost.

For more information on the series, contact Marjorie Sandor in the OSU Department of English at 541-737-1648.