Reading by Laura van den Berg rescheduled for Feb. 17

Author Laura van den Berg, 2009-10 Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College, will read from her fiction at 3:15 p.m., Feb. 17, in the 1770s Room in the York College Iosue Student Union. The event, sponsored by the College’s Creative Writing Program, is open to the public.

van den Berg’s first collection of stories, “What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us,” was published by Dzanc Books in October 2009 and was a pick for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Program. Stories from this collection -- which have appeared in “One Story,” “American Short Fiction,” “The Literary Review,” “Boston Review,” and “The Indiana Review” -- illuminate the intersection of the mythic and the mundane. A failed actress takes a job as a Bigfoot impersonator. A botanist seeking a rare flower crosses paths with a group of men hunting the Loch Ness Monster. A disillusioned missionary in Africa grapples with grief and a growing obsession with a creature rumored to live in the forests of the Congo. And in the title story, a young woman traveling with her scientist mother in Madagascar confronts her burgeoning sexuality and her dream of becoming a long-distance swimmer. “van den Berg taps into her characters’ losses with an impressive clarity . . . these tales are the work of a notable author finding her voice,” wrote “Publishers Weekly.”

van den Berg was raised in Florida and earned an MFA at Emerson College. She is the recipient of scholarships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences, and of the 2009 Julia Peterkin Award. Formerly an assistant editor at “Ploughshares,” she is currently a fiction editor at “West Branch” and the assistant editor of “Memorious,” an online journal of new verse and fiction. She has taught writing at Emerson College, Grub Street, and in PEN/New England’s Freedom to Write Program. Her fiction has or will soon appear in “One Story,” “Boston Review,”  “American Short Fiction,” “StoryQuarterly,” “Best New American Voices 2010,” and “The Pushcart Prize XXIV: Best of the Small Presses,” among other publications.