Award-winning John Jeremiah Sullivan is the featured author for the upcoming Words to Say It series at Coastal Carolina University on Thursday, April 25, at 7 p.m. in Clay D. Brittain Jr. Hall (formerly Penny Hall), Room 114. The reading is free and open to the public, as is the reception and book-signing afterward.

Sullivan is author of "Pulphead: Essays" (2011) and "Blood Horses: Notes of a Sportswriter's Son" (2005), which was named Book of the Year by the Economist magazine.

Sullivan was born in Louisville, Ky., and now lives in North Carolina with his wife and daughters. He's a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and the Southern editor of the Paris Review. He has been the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, two National Magazine Awards, a Pushcart Prize and a research fellowship at the New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. He was a finalist for the Pen Prize in memoir and the National Book Critics Circle Award in nonfiction.

"Pulphead: Essays" made numerous end-of-year Top 10 lists. The New York Times Book Review called it "the best and most important collection of magazine writing since [David Foster] Wallace's 'A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again.' James Wood, writing in The New Yorker, described it as "literary freedom in action."

"John Jeremiah Sullivan is a dynamic and gutsy writer, a cross between Flannery O'Connor and a decaffeinated Tom Wolfe, with just the right dash of Hunter S. Thompson," said Neal Thompson in an amazon.com Best Books of 2011 review. "Put another way: if Tom Waits wrote essays, they might sound like "Pulphead."

Brittain Hall is located at 125 Chanticleer Drive W. on the Conway campus. For more information on this event, contact Dan Albergotti at 843-349-2420 or albergot@coastal.edu.