Patricia Hampl ReadingOctober 13, 2011 at 7:30–9:30 p.m.

Patricia Hampl's most recent book, The Florist's Daughter, won numerous "best eand "year end eawards, including the New York Times "100 Notable Books of the Year eand the 2008 Minnesota Book Award for Memoir and Creative Nonfiction. Blue Arabesque: A Search for the Sublime (2006) was also a Times Notable Book. She first won recognition for A Romantic Education, her memoir about her Czech heritage, awarded a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship. This book and subsequent works have established her as an influential figure in the rise of autobiographical writing in the past 30 years. Her fiction, poems, reviews, essays and travel pieces have appeared in many publications, including The New Yorker, Paris Review, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim and Bush Foundations, and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1990 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. Hampl is Regents Professor and McKnight Distinguished Professor at the University of Minnesota. She is also serves on the permanent faculty of the Prague Summer Program, and gives readings, lectures and workshops across the United States and internationally.