The Otterbein College Writers Series will present the following events in October. All Writers Series events are free and open to the public.

Essayist Richard Gilbert

Reading at 4 p.m. on Thursday, October 8
Room 112 of Towers Hall, 1 S. Grove St., Westerville

Richard Gilbert is a journalist and essayist, and the former marketing manager of Ohio University Press. He has taught at Ohio University, Indiana University and The Ohio State University, where he was a Kiplinger Fellow. Gilbert has operated a sheep farm for more than a decade in Athens, Ohio, and has written extensively about farming. He writes a blog called NARRATIVE, for writers, teachers, and students of narrative essays, literary journalism, creative nonfiction and memoir.

Novelist Ann Pancake

Lecture at 3 p.m. on Tuesday, October 27
The Fritsche Theatre in Cowan Hall, 30 S. Grove St., Westerville

Ann Pancake is the author of this year’s Otterbein Common Book, Strange As This Weather Has Been, about mountaintop removal mining in her home state of West Virginia. Her novel rings with the truth of documentary, as it is based on extensive interviews and conversations with people in the southern West Virginia and eastern Kentucky coalfields, but it is also a work of brave imagination—rich in characters and powerfully experimental in language.