PIQUA — Edison State Community College English Department will celebrate Peace Week by presenting a talk by Dayton Literary Peace Prize nonfiction award-winner Susan Southard, Thursday, Nov. 17, at noon, in the Robinson Theater on campus in Piqua.

Southard will discuss her novel, “Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War,” which chronicles the story of five survivors of the bombing of Nagasaki.

“Nagasaki” also garnered the 2016 Lukas Book Prize, sponsored by the Columbia School of Journalism and Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism. Southard’s work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Politico, and Lapham’s Quarterly.

Southard holds Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from Antioch University, Los Angeles, and was a nonfiction fellow at the Norman Mailer Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Southard directs creative writing programs, has taught nonfiction seminars and is the founder and artistic director of Essential Theatre, in Phoenix, Arizona.

The Edison event precedes the Dayton Literary Peace Prize awards ceremony, which will be Nov. 20 in the Benjamin J. Shuster Center in Dayton. Inspired by the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords that ended the war in Bosnia, the prize is the only international literary peace prize awarded in the United States. The prize celebrates the power of literature to promote peace, social justice and global understanding.

Before Southard’s visit to campus, a series of peace-focused events will occur throughout the week. A “peace walk” will be on display near the Myers Vacarro Art Gallery and feature a graffiti wall, selfie station and a series of quotations about peace.

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