Award-winning author Rebecca Solnit to hold reading April 5 at CSB

Writer, activist and historian Rebecca Solnit will be conducting a reading at 7 p.m. Tuesday, April 5 at room 204, Gorecki Center on the campus of the College of Saint Benedict.

The event, sponsored by the Literary Arts Institute at CSB, is free and open to the public.

Solnit, writing out of San Francisco, California, is the author of 17 books with topics ranging from geography, community, art, politics, hope and feminism. She is the winner of numerous awards, including the Lannan Literary Award and the National Book Critics Award for "River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West."

Solnit's books include "Men Explain Things to Me;" "Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas;" "The Faraway Nearby;" "Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas;" and "A Paradise Built in Hell."

The Los Angeles Review of Books calls Solnit "an explorer of the most exquisite kind, and a writer of the public road," and that "among Solnit's great achievements is managing so much discordant and concordant information, in making the leaps and transitions from one idea to the next, in finding her way and so helping us, her readers, find ours."

A holder of a master's degree from the University of California, Berkeley, Solnit is an independent writer along with being a frequent contributor to Tomdispact.com and an contributing editor for Harper's Magazine, where she is the first woman to regularly write the Easy Chair column since its conception in 1851.

The Literary Arts Institute was founded in 1997 to foster creative writing, publishing and interaction between writers and students. The LAI brings nationally recognized authors to the College (through the Writers Writing program), promotes literary events (Readers Theater), holds conferences (Inside Books), supports publications (the S. Mariella Gable Prize) and encourages the artistry of fine letterpress (Book Arts Studio).

With its local and national partners, such as Graywolf Press, the LAI is able to bring writers and their work together with readers on campus, in Minnesota and beyond.