Acclaimed fairy-tale writer will speak at Southeast on Sept. 15

Kate Bernheimer, called "one of the living masters of the fairy tale," will present a lecture and reading Sept. 15 as the fall 2015 Nilsen Endowment Visiting Writer at Southeast Missouri State University.

Bernheimer's presentation is scheduled for 7 p.m. in Glenn Auditorium of Robert A. Dempster Hall, Southeast announced this week. The event is free to the public.

Bernheimer is the author of a novel trilogy and the story collections "Horse," "Flower," "Bird" and "How a Mother Weaned Her Girl from Fairy Tales." She is the editor of four anthologies, including the World Fantasy Award-winning and best-selling "My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales" and the World Fantasy Award nominee "xo Orpheus: 50 New Myths."

Bernheimer is an associate professor of English at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where she teaches fairy tales and creative writing.

She is founder and editor of the journal "Fairy Tale Review" and author of an acclaimed book for children, "The Girl in the Castle Inside the Museum," chosen as a best picture book of the year by Publishers Weekly in 2008. Her most recent book for children is "The Lonely Book," illustrated by Chris Sheban and an Amazon.com "Best Books of the Month" selection for May 2012.

"Fairy tales are so much about isolated underdogs searching for home; as a very shy kid, I felt most at home inside books and inside stories," Bernheimer said in a statement about her interests in the fairy-tale genre. "It happened that many of the books available to me in the public library were magical books. ... Fairy tales gave me new confidence, not so much in my abilities but in the way that I saw the world -- broken and magical at the very same time."

Pertinent address:

1 University Plaza, Cape Girardeau, Mo.