University of North Texas

Tiphanie Yanique, right, an award winning fiction author, will speak Feb. 28 as part of the Department of English Visiting Writers Series.

Yanique will be available for a question-and-answer session at 4 p.m. in the Language Building, Room 316

A reading and book signing will be at 8 p.m. in the University Union, Silver Eagle Suite.

Yanique is the author of How to Escape from a Leper Colony, published by Graywolf Press.

Her writing won the 2011 BOCAS Prize for Caribbean Fiction, the Boston Review Prize in Fiction, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, a Pushcart Prize and an Academy of American Poet's Prize. She also was a Fulbright Scholar.

Yanique has been listed by the The Boston Globe as one of 16 cultural figures to watch, and by the National Book Foundation as one of 5 Under 35, a list announcing the next generation of fiction writers.

Her writing has been published in Best African American Fiction, The Wall Street Journal, American Short Fiction and other places. 

Yanique is a native of the Virgin Islands and is a professor in the MFA program at the New School in New York City.