Under a new visiting writers program, the University will host two prominent authors next month. Josephine Humphreys and Stuart Dybek will read from their upcoming works of fiction and conduct a writers-student workshop.

The project, "The Writer in Our World" is under the direction of Charlotte Holmes and Bruce Weigl, who are both members of the University's English department. Funding came from a $1000 grant to the English department by the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Additional money will come from the Institute for Arts and Humanistic Studies and the College of Liberal Arts.

Holmes said Humphreys and Dybek were asked to come to the University because they are prominent, interesting and young.

"They were selected for the quality of their work," Holmes said. "We wanted to invite younger, critically acclaimed writers to meet with our student writers. There is still the feeling that one has to be dead or old to be a writer, and we hope to prove that this isn't the case at all. We wanted to show that people not too much older than they are indeed writers of some acclaim."

Humphreys' first novel Dreams of Sleep earned her the 1985 Ernest Hemingway Award from PEN, a New York-based writers organization. Dreams of Sleep is set in the deep South and is the story of middle-aged Alice Reece, her crumbling marriage, her daughters, her meddlesome mother-in-law, and her encounter with the mysterious baby-sitter Iris Moon.

Humphreys writes as if she has been meditating not only on all the vagueness of human character but on the uses of the English language. Her supermarket-novel characters use words and phrases in such a way that we feel uncomfortable holding them to their supermarket-novel stereotypes.

Humphreys is a graduate of Duke University and lives in Charleston, South Carolina with her husband and children. Her latest novel, Rich in Love, has met with favorable reviews. Both of her books are published by Viking.

Stuart Dybek is the author of a book of short stories titled Children and Other Neighborhoods published by Viking in 1980. It is a collection of stories set in the Chicago of Dybek's youth. His stories are ethnic and bawdy. Adolescence repressed in black humor and tales of sexual awakening and budding homosexuality are the themes in such stories as "The Palatski Man" and "Blood Soup". In 1983 Dybek won the O.Henry Award for his story "Hot Ice". He has been featured in such magazines as The Atlantic, Anteaus, The Iowa Review and The Paris Review.

He has also distinguished himself in poetry with his 1979 collection of poems titled Brass Knuckles (Pittsburgh). Like his short stories, his poems are filled with the racy language of a smart-aleck Chicago kid in the 1960's. Pop-culture icons work their way into Polish weddings and images of teenage sex and middle-aged neurotics. Dybek is a professor at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo.

Holmes said the University has a successful visiting poets program and she would like to see the funding made available to do the same for fiction writers, with up to three visiting writers a year.

"We have a huge program here (for fiction writing), almost 300 people (are) involved, that's why this is such an exciting event," Holmes said.

As an accomplished writer published in the New Yorker, the Carlolina Quarterly and The Sothern Review, Holmes' advice to young writers is "Read, read a lot and write all the time, but read."

Humphreys' reading is scheduled for April 11 and Dybek's for April 20, both at 8 p.m. in 112 Walker.