Award Winning Writer Reads from Works April 26" 

SALISBURY, MD---Award-winning writer and former Salisbury State University faculty member Cary Holladay reads from her works, Thursday, April 26, at 8 p.m. in the Montgomery Room of the Commons as part of the Writers-on-the-Shore Spring Literary Festival. Admission is free and the public is invited. A reception follows. 

"Holladay's stories are beautifully constructed, and they are filled with sensuous, even wondrous images . . . within them lie both the seed of survival and the possibility of epiphany," said the New York Times Book Review. 

Author of two collections of short stories, The People Down South and The Palace of Wasted Footsteps, Holladay has received fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the Tennessee Arts Commission. She is now at work on a novel and another collection of stories. 

One of her works, "Merry-Go-Sorry," won second prize in the 1999 O. Henry Awards. Stephen King, one of the contest judges, wrote the introduction that appears with that story in the O. Henry Prize Stories volume. 

Her story’s “passionate and yet carefully controlled narration” contains “inspired (and sometimes eccentric) tracing of lives,” he said.

She received her undergraduate degree from the College of William and Mary and an M.A. from Pennsylvania State University. From 1985-88, she lived in Salisbury, teaching English at SSU and the University of Maryland Eastern Shore. 

She has taught creative writing at a number of schools, including La Salle University and the University of Pennsylvania. 

Currently she lives in Memphis, TN, where she serves as the public affairs manager for the City of Memphis Division of Park Services.

Holladay's reading is sponsored by the reading is sponsored by the English Department, Multiethnic Student Services, Fulton School Visiting Speaker and Artist Fund, Mid-Atlantic Review and the departments of Communication Arts, History, Political Science and Sociology.

For information call 410-543-6540 or visit the University's Web site at www.salisbury.edu.