WordTheatre Returns Monday, Oct. 7, With Author Bobbie Ann Mason Free event will feature Actors Tess Harper and Cassidy Freeman Reading Mason's Stories.

Acclaimed Kentucky novelist, short story writer and literary critic Bobbie Ann Mason will bring Southern flair to Chapman’s Orange campus on Monday, Oct. 7, as part of WordTheatre’s fall lineup. Actors Tess Harper (“No Country For Old Men,” “Tender Mercies” and “Crimes of the Heart”), Cassidy Freeman (“Righteous Gemstones,” “Longmire” and “Smallville”), and Chapman screen acting student Regina Bryant will read short stories and excerpts from Mason’s works, including “In Country,” “Shiloh & Other Stories” and “Patchwork.”

Doors open at 6:45 p.m. at the Fish Interfaith Center. The performance is free for Chapman students, staff and faculty and will run from 7 p.m.–8:30 p.m., followed by a Q&A with Mason.

Mason is a writer whose work is praised for a spirit of exploration that glows with a nuanced understanding of the struggles and pathos of American life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Anne Tyler hails Mason as “a full-fledged master of the short story.” Raymond Carver calls her a “literary phenomenon.”

A hybrid of theatre and storytelling, WordTheatre celebrates the written word through public readings performed by professional actors from television and the motion picture industry.