2015 Sister Mariella Gable Award winner Eula Biss to hold reading at CSB

Eula Biss, the 2015 Sister Mariella Gable Award winner for her book "On Immunity: An Inoculation," will deliver a reading from the book at 7 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 25, at room 204, Gorecki Center, College of Saint Benedict. The event is free and open to the public.

She will also discuss her book at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 24, at the Fitzgerald Theater, St. Paul, with Michael Osterholm, the former Minnesota state epidemiologist and current Regents Professor at the University of Minnesota, and host Kerri Miller from Minnesota Public Radio. Tickets range from $25-$50 for this event.

Both events are co-sponsored by the Literary Arts Institute at CSB and Graywolf Press, Minneapolis. The St. Paul event is also co-sponsored by MPR News.

In "On Immunity: An Inoculation," Biss writes as a new mother about the multitude of threats parents face as they attempt to keep their children safe. She finds that you cannot immunize your child - or yourself - from the world.

The Sister Mariella Gable Award is given each year by CSB for an important work of literature published by Graywolf Press. Graywolf Press, described by Ploughshares magazine as "arguably the best small press in the country," and LAI have formed an innovative collaboration to explore new ways of promoting the literary arts on campus, to audiences in the surrounding area and in the Twin Cities.

Besides receiving the Sister Mariella Gable Award, the book was a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice and Publisher's Weekly PW Pick of the Week. It was also a finalist for the 2015 Midwest Booksellers Choice Award and an Indies Choice Book Awards honoree.

Biss, who received her bachelor of arts in nonfiction writing at Hampshire College and a M.F.A. in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa, is the author of two other books, "The Balloonists" and "Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays."

She is the author of essays published in The Best American Nonrequired Reading, Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Nonfiction, Harper's, Denver Quarterly and others.

Biss' writing has been backed by a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Howard Foundation Fellowship, an NEA Literature Fellowship and a Jaffe's Writers' Award.

Sister Mariella Gable was an English professor at CSB from 1928-72. Outside of the classroom, Gable was a Dante scholar, poet, editor and writer. She played a prominent role in the development of such renowned writers as J.F. Powers, Flannery O'Connor and Betty Wahl.

Past winners of the Sister Mariella Gable Award include Claudia Rankine (2014), Ru Freeman (2013), Deborah Baker (2012), Binyavanga Wainaina (2011), Tiphanie Yanique (2010), Ellen Bryant Voigt (2009), Linda Gregg (2008), Tracy K. Smith (2007), Nurruddin Farah (2006), Jane Kenyon (2005), Clint McCown (2004), Joe Coomer (2003), Judith Kitchen (2002) and Victoria Redel (2001).