Coastal Carolina University's "The Words to Say It Visiting Writers Series" welcomes a fiction reading by the critically acclaimed author Donald Ray Pollock on Thursday, April 4, at 7 p.m., in CCU's Edwards Recital Hall. A reception and book-signing will follow the reading. This event is free and open to the public.

Pollock is the author of the award-winning short story collection, "Knockemstiff" and the novel, "The Devil All the Time." His essays and stories have appeared in "The New York Times" and many other venues.

Pollock grew up in southern Ohio, in a holler named Knockemstiff. After dropping out of high school at 17, he worked in a meatpacking plant and a paper mill for 32 years before he began to write fiction. At age 45, he was accepted to Ohio State University's MFA Program in Creative Writing, and his first book, "Knockemstiff" won the 2009 PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship. His first novel, "The Devil All the Time," won the Chaffin Award for Appalachian Writing and the Grand Prix de Litterature Policiere, the French prize for the best international crime novel. Pollock is also the recipient of a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship.

Publishers Weekly says of the writer, "Pollock gives us over to despair and destitution and an undiluted primal evil; he raises the grotesque to art. You can't believe what you're reading but you do, and you can't stop reading it."

The Edwards Recital Hall is in the Thomas W. and Robin W. Edwards College of Humanities and Fine Arts, located on 133 Chanticleer Drive W. in Conway.

For more information on this event, contact Joe Oestreich at 843-349-2433 or joeo@coastal.edu.