Author Karen Bender will read her work Monday, Oct. 23 at 7 p.m. in the Howard Room, University Center, at Samford University. The event is part of the Birmingham Area Consortium for Higher Education (BACHE) Visiting Writers Series.

Bender’s story collection Refund was a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction, on the short list for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Prize, and on the longlist for the Story Prize. It was also a Los Angeles Times bestseller.

Bender is also the author of the novels A Town of Empty Rooms and Like Normal People, which was a Los Angeles Times bestseller, a Washington Post Best Book of the Year, and a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. Her short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Ploughshares, Zoetrope, Story, Narrative, The Harvard Review, Guernica, and The Iowa Review, Best American Short Stories, Best American Mystery Stories, and New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best. She has won two Pushcart prizes and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rona Jaffe foundation.