DANVILLE, KY- Mary Hood, a Southern writer who has won the Flannery O'Connor Award for short fiction, is serving as writer-in-residence aê College during the winter short term. Hood is teaching a creative writing class and will give a public reading Tuesday, Feb. 9. The reading will begin at 8 p.m. in the board room of the Norton Center for the Arts. It is open to the public at no cost.

Hood was born in Georgia and her first collection of short stories was published by the University of Georgia Press in 1984. That volume, How Far She Went , won the O'Connor Award and the Southern Review Short Fiction Award. Two years later, Hood published a second collection entitled And Venus Is Blue, which won the Townsend Prize for Fiction.

Her most recent work is a novel, Familiar Heat, published in 1995.

Hood's writing has won praise in the book review sections of the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. Because her stories are drawn from the contemporary South, she has been compared to great Southern writers such as Eudora Welty and Carson McCullers, yet her characters have a more modern feel. They struggle with their lives, their marriages and their work, trying to hold things together but rarely succeeding.

Hood is a graduate of Georgia State University.

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