TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – The Bankhead Visiting Writers Series opens its 2004-05 season with a reading by UA alumni Kevin Bath, Amy Benson, Cathy Day and Valerie Vogrin at 7:30 p.m. Oct. 21 in Room 205 of Smith Hall on The University of Alabama campus.

Under the pen name K.P Bath, Kevin Bath is the author of the children’s book, “The Secret of Castle Cant,” (Little, Brown, 2004). The book recently was chosen as an alternate selection of the Children’s Book of the Month Club, and as a selection of the Junior Library Guild.

His work has appeared Gulf Coast, Red Wheelbarrow, EPOCH, Puerto del Soul, The Iconoclast, Flying Island, and Green Mountains Review.

Bath holds a Master of Fine Arts from UA and has worked as a field hand, factory laborer, musician, editor and teacher. Born in Tipton, Ind., he lives in Portland, Ore., where he volunteers at the Beverly Cleary Children’s Library and works at the newspaper, The Asian Reporter.

Amy Benson’s book, “The Sparking-Eyed Boy,” (Houghton Mifflin), was named the 2003 Katherine Bakeless Nason Prize winner in creative nonfiction, as sponsored by the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference.

She’s a former co-editor of Laurel Review, and her poetry and prose have appeared in journals such as Fourth Genre, Quarterly West, Pleiades, New Orleans Review, Connecticut Review, Sonora Review, River Teeth and River Styx. Born and raised in Detroit, she holds a Master of Fine Arts from UA and now lives in New York.

Cathy Day is the author of “The Circus in Winter,” (Harcourt, 2004). She grew up in Peru, Ind., which was once the winter home of the Hagenback-Wallace Circus.

Her work has appeared in New Stories from the South, The Antioch Review, Story, Shenandoah, The Southern Review and others. Since she received her Master of Fine Arts from UA in 1995, she has won a Bush Artist Fellowship and the Tennessee Williams Scholarship to attend the Sewanee Writer’s Conference. Day currently teaches creative writing at The College of New Jersey.

Valerie Vogrin is the author of the novel “Shebang” (University Press of Mississippi, 2004), a novel that revolves around a Tuscaloosa front porch.

Her fiction has been published in numerous journals, including Carolina Quarterly, Chattahoochee Review, and Black Warrior Review. In addition, she has contributed to American Women Writers and The Encyclopedia of Modern Dance (St. James Press). She is a past winner of the Playboy College Fiction Contest, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in the fall of 2002.

Vogrin received her Master of Fine Arts from UA and currently teaches at Southern Illinois University – Edwardsville.

The Bankhead Visiting Writers Series is made possible by an endowment from the Bankhead Foundation, The University of Alabama’s Program in Creative Writing, the department of English and the College of Arts and Sciences. For more information, please contact UA’s creative writing program at 205/348-0766 or visit www.bama.ua.edu/~writing.