Please note that the platform forced outdated contact information above. The event organizer is Marti Eads in the English program (540.432.4165/martha.eads@emu.edu.)

Award-winning fiction writer and EMU alumna Patricia Grace King (1989) will read selections from her new book, THOSE WHO VANISH, and discuss her writing process with her former student Esther Harder (2003) at a university homecoming kick-off event in Martin Chapel at 7 pm on October 8, 2026. Q and A and book-signing will follow.

Winner of the 2026 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, THOSE WHO VANISH follows the stories of Guatemalan citizens and North American expats set on a collision course by war. Set in a world of daily disappearances, the collection addresses a vital question: When all certainties are snatched away, what remains of lives, of memory, of faith?

King, a North Carolina native who now lives in Durham, England, draws from her experience of having lived in Guatemala. Harder, who documented peace efforts in Uganda and Rwanda for a decade after graduating from EMU, now serves as a "book coach who helps writers with battered passports transform their far-flung lives into cohesive narratives."