Authors Rebecca Barry, Beth Ann Fennelly

Authors Rebecca Barry and Beth Ann Fennelly will read from their own works on May 26 and May 28 at Knox College.

Barry will read from her own works at 4 p.m., Monday, May 26, in the Alumni Room, Old Main. Fennelly will read from her own work at 4 p.m., Wednesday, May 28, in the Alumni Room. The readings are free and open to the public.

Barry has written both fiction and non-fiction. Her first novel, "Later, At the Bar," is structured as a series of stories about a small-town bar in upstate New York. Her short stories have appeared in Ploughshares, One Story, Tin House, Mid American Review and The Best New American Voices. Her essay "The Happiest Man in Cuba" was published in the Washington Post Magazine and selected for the anthology "Best American Travel Writing 2003." Her works of non-fiction have been published in The New York Times Magazine, Organic Style, Real Simple, and Seventeen.

Barry received a bachelor's degree at Cornell University and a master of fine arts at Ohio State University.

Fennelly's books of poetry include "A Different Kind of Hunger," winner of the 1997 Texas Review Breakthrough Award"; Open House," which won the 2001 Kenyon Review Prize in Poetry for a First Book; and her most recent, "Unmentionables." Her poems also have been published in anthologies, including "Poets of the New Century" and "The Penguin Book of the Sonnet."

Fennelly has received a Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, an Illinois Arts Council Grant and the Diane Middlebrook Fellowship from the University of Wisconsin.

A graduate of the University of Notre Dame, she earned a master of fine arts degree at the University of Arkansas. She taught at Knox College from 1999 to 2001 and currently teaches at the University of Mississippi.

Founded in 1837, Knox is a national liberal arts college in Galesburg, Illinois, with students from 45 states and 44 nations. Knox's 'Old Main' is a National Historic Landmark and the only building remaining from the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates.