Hobart and William Smith Colleges

29 April 1999 Author and Alum Melissa Bank Returns to HWS

Geneva, NY Melissa Bank, who has been called the freshiest new voice in womens writing and who has been featured in the New York Times, and in Vogue and Self magazines, will return to Hobart and William Smith Colleges to conduct a reading of her just-published novel, The Girls Guide To Hunting And Fishing (Viking, 1999) at 8 p.m. on Thursday, May 13, in the Geneva Room on the HWS campus. The public is invited.

The Colleges proudly claim Bank, a 1982 graduate of William Smith College, who also holds a master of fine art degree from Cornell University, as on one of their own.

Bank is the winner of the 1993 Nelson Algren Award for short fiction, and has published stories in Zoetrope, the Chicago Tribune, The North American Review, Other Voices, and Ascent. Her work has also been heard on Selected Shorts on National Public Radio. She now divides her time between New York City and Sag Harbor, and is at work on a novel as well as on a screen play for Girls Guide, which is in development with Francis Ford Coppola and Zoetrope studios.

In a series of delightful interconnected episodes of love and loss, growing older, and getting smarter, Girls Guide explores the life lessons of Jane, the contemporary American everywoman. As Jane works her way from defiant teenager to reluctant career girl to more mature, persistently hopeful young woman, she maneuvers her way through love, sex, relationships, and the occasional perils of the workplace. According to Bank, The book is about being single, but its more about finding loveJane is not someone who bemoans being alone. After all, the loneliest intervals are when youre in a relationship with someone who doesnt know who you are.

Bank has been called one of the freshest, wittiest, and most honest voices in womens fiction to come along in years. Wise, poignant, and full of the kind of laugh-out-loud insights best friends share, Girls Guide is an event waiting to happen.