July 25, 2004

"The Company We Keep: Writers and the Characters They Create"

Award-winning author Kat Meads talks about the allure of fictional characters--both for readers and writers. She'll discuss how they're "built" on the page and how and why the best of the lot stick in the memory far better than the living, breathing folks we know.

Kat Meads is the author, most recently, of the novel Sleep. In 2002, she received a California Artist Fellowship and, in 2003, a National Endowment for the Arts grant. She has won awards for her fiction from Chelsea, Inkwell Magazine and Illinois Writers Inc. Her short plays have been produced in New York, California and the Midwest. A former artist-in-residence at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Yaddo, Millay Colony for the Arts and Montalvo Center for the Arts, she holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina - Greensboro. She is currently writing program coordinator at UCSC-Extension.Visit her website at www.katmeads.com.