FARMINGTON – Award-winning nonfiction writer, poet and essayist Richard Hoffman will be the second reader in the University of Maine at Farmington’s 2008-09 Visiting Writers Series. Hoffman will read from his work at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 9, in The Landing in the Olsen Student Center. The reading is free and open to the public and will be followed with a signing by the author.

Hoffman’s publications include two books of poetry, “Without Paradise” and “Goldstar Road,” as well as a memoir titled “Half the House,” which the Boston Globe referred to as “compelling.”

His other work, both prose and verse, has appeared in Agni, Ascent, Harvard Review, Hudson Review, The Literary Review, Poetry, Shenandoah and Witness as well as in a number of anthologies. He has received several fellowships and awards, most recently a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship in fiction and The Literary Review’s Charles Angoff Prize.

Hoffman is writer-in-residence at Emerson College and also teaches in the Stonecoast master of fine arts program at the University of Southern Maine.

The Visiting Writers Series is put on by UMF’s Bachelor of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, the only such degree in the state. This is a selective program that offers a combination of writing and literature courses in the context of study in the liberal arts.

For more information, contact UMF Assistant Professor Jeffrey Thomson, department of creative writing, at 778-7454 or at jeffrey.thomson@maine.edu.