The New West Writers Series is a project of the Creative Writing Program at UNLV that enriches the Las Vegas community by providing opportunities for readers and writers to meet in celebration of literature. The lectures, sponsored by Nevada Humanities and The International Institute of Modern Letters, are free and open to the public and will be held in auditorium of the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Natural History at UNLV.

Gillian Conoley *** CANCELLED ***
Sept. 22- 6:30 p.m.

C.J. Hribal
Sept. 23- 7:30 p.m.

Hribal, professor of English at Marquette University, will read from his acclaimed new novel, "The Company Car," which chronicles the Czabeck family's memorable life adventures over the past 50 years. Hribal, author of the novels "American Beauty" and "Matty's Heart," has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He received his master's degree in creative writing from Syracuse University, where he studied under Tobias Wolff and the late Raymond Carver.

Paul Hoover
Oct. 13- 6:30 p.m.

Visiting professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University, Hoover is co-editor of the literary magazine "New American Writing" and author of numerous poetry collections. He will be reading from his latest work, "Poems in Spanish," which blends the English language with the lyricism of Spanish, paying tribute to the great poets writing in the Ibero Hispanic tradition of the 20 th century. Hoover has been awarded the Jerome J. Shestack Award from "American Poetry Review," an NEA Fellowship, and the Carl Sandberg Award for poetry.

Jean Valentine
Nov. 15- 6:30 p.m.

Valentine is the author of 11 books of poetry, including the recent "Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems," winner of the National Book Award in 2004, from which she will be reading. A recipient of awards from The Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Endowment for the Arts, The Rockefeller Foundation, and The New York Council for the Arts, Valentine has taught at Sarah Lawrence College as well as the graduate writing programs of New York University and Columbia University.

Karen Brennan
Dec. 1- 6:30 p.m.

Brennan, professor of English at the University of Utah, will read from her latest work, "The Real Enough World," a book that displays varied writing styles and speculates about the invention of self in the act of writing poems. Since 1993, Brennan has been on the low residency faculty of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, and won the 1990 Associated Writing Program Award for Short Fiction for her book, "Wild Desire."