FARMINGTON - Award-winning fiction writer Katherine Min will be the second reader in the University of Maine at Farmington's spring 2008 Visiting Writers Series Thursday, March 6.

She will read from her work at 7:30 p.m. in The Landing in UMF's Olsen Student Center. The reading is free and open to the public, and will be followed by a book-signing.

Min's short stories have appeared in numerous publications, including TriQuarterly, Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review and Prairie Schooner; and have been widely anthologized, most recently in "The Pushcart Book of Stories: The Best Short Stories from a Quarter-Century of The Pushcart Prize."

"Eyelids" was listed as one of 100 distinguished stories in "The Best American Short Stories of 1997." "The Brick" was read on National Public Radio's Selected Shorts program in 1999. "Courting a Monk" won a Pushcart Prize. Min was awarded New Hampshire Arts Council fellowships and received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Her debut novel, "Secondhand World," was a finalist for the PEN/Bingham Award, given to "an exceptionally talented fiction writer whose debut work represents distinguished literary achievement and suggests great promise."

The novel was also selected as one of the best books of 2006 by School Library Journal and one of the best debut novels of the year by the Rocky Mountain News, and was a winter guide pick on MSNBC.com.

Min was born in Champaign-Urbana, Ill., and graduated from Amherst College and the Columbia School of Journalism. She currently teaches at the University of North Carolina at Asheville and at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival.