Award-winning author and faculty member reads from latest book

Chandler-Gilbert Community College English faculty and creative writing program founder Patrick Finn appeared at the Changing Hands bookstore on March 10 to read from his short story collection From the Darkness Right Under Our Feet. The book won the 2009 Hudson Prize and was selected by Donal Day Pollock, a GQ Magazine's 2011 Book of the Year author, as his favorite book published that year.

"I spent eight years writing it and all the stories are set in Joliet, Illinois, a Rustbelt city southwest of Chicago where I spent the first sixteen years of my life," said Finn. "I suppose my inspiration was making sense and shape of the wreckage of my childhood. My first book, the novella A Martyr for Suzy Kosasovich, is also set there."

Finn is currently at work on two new books, a novel called A Place for Snakes to Breed, and a collection of new stories called Superstitions, both of which are set in the American Southwestern deserts of California and Arizona, where he's lived since 1989.