'Ahab's Wife' author to speak at UNA in April

* What: Best-selling author Sena Jeter Naslund

* When: 7 p.m. Thursday, April 10

* Where: Performance Center, Robert M. Guillot University Center, University of North Alabama

* Cost: Free

* Details: 765-4238

Best-selling author and Birmingham native Sena Jeter Naslund, recipient of the Harper Lee Award, will be at the University of North Alabama in a program sponsored by the school's women's studies.

Naslund wrote "Ahab's Wife: Or, The Star-Gazer: A Novel," one of Time magazine's five best novels of 1999. At UNA, she will speak, read from her work and answer questions.

"We are thrilled that she will be reading at UNA," said Anna Lott of UNA's English department. "Her work exemplifies an important goal of women's studies - to recognize and celebrate women's accomplishments and to view those accomplishments in the context of other, more traditionally recognized endeavors."

The novel is the "memoir" of Una, whose husband, Ahab, was the fictional whale-hunter in Herman Melville's American classic, "Moby-Dick."

"Set in the context of Ahab's quest for the Great White Whale, 'Ahab's Wife' has obvious implications for students of literature and women's studies," Lott said.

"But, the novel should also be of interest to historians, sociologists and even astronomers - Maria Mitchell, the first person to see a comet through a telescope, is featured in it."

"Ahab's Wife" was also named a best novel by Book Sense and was on Notable Book lists in the New York Times' Book Review and Publishers Weekly. It was a main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club and has been translated and published internationally.

Naslund's novel "Four Sprits," set in Birmingham during the early 1960s civil rights struggle, will be published in September.

She is a distinguished teaching professor at the University of Louisville. At Spalding University, she directs a new brief-residency master's of arts in writing program in which students and faculty converge in Louisville for 10 days, followed by a semester of correspondence.

She has also taught in the master-of-fine-arts programs of the University of Montana, Indiana University and Vermont College. She is editor of the literary magazine The Louisville Review and the Fleur-de-Lis Press. This spring, she shares the Vacca Chair with her husband, physicist John Morrison, at the University of Montevallo.

Naslund was born in Birmingham, where she attended public schools and Birmingham-Southern College.

She has a doctorate from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Kentucky Arts Council and Kentucky Foundation for Women. Her short fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, The Georgia Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The American Voice and many other journals.