WRITER IN-RESIDENCE ROBERT OLMSTEAD WILL READ FROM WORKS APRIL 7

Boise State University's Robert Olmstead, this spring's writer in-residence in Old Dominion's English department, will give a fiction reading at 7 p.m. Friday, April 7, in Room 100 of Kaufman Hall.

He'll also lead a master class at 7 p.m. Monday, April 17, in the Burgess Room of the Batten Arts and Letters Building. Both are open to the campus community.

Olmstead is director of his university's master of fine arts program in creative writing, which was first offered last year. He is the author of fiction and nonfiction works, including a collection of short stories, "River Dogs"; three novels, "Soft Water," "A Trail of Heart's Blood Wherever We Go" and "America by Land"; a memoir, "Stay Here with Me"; and "Elements of the Writing Craft," which is now used in creative writing programs around the country.

Olmstead grew up working on his family's six-generation dairy farm near Keene, N.H. He draws heavily on the experience in his writing.

"Memory is always more true to the present mind than to the past, always more true to itself than to anything else," he writes in the memoir. "This is a story from when I was a kid and worked on the farm for my grandfather and how I see now what I saw then."

Of "A Trail of Heart's Blood," a writer in The New York Times Book Review remarked that "Olmstead has the skill for lending every present moment an extraordinary, sensuous glow."