Author Philip Graham will read from "Dreaming the Towers," his forthcoming novel about the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, at 4 p.m., Friday, November 5, in the Alumni Room, Old Main, Knox College, Galesburg, Illinois. The reading is free and open to the public.

A native of New York City, Graham teaches at the University of Illinois at Urbana. When the World Trade Center was destroyed on September 11, 2001, Graham returned to New York to spend two months as a volunteer at "Ground Zero." The novel is based in part on his experiences, and according to Graham it "examines the attack against the World Trade Center as the immediate impetus for radiating sets of psychological violence, centered initially in the dreamscapes of the fictional characters."

Graham is the author of two story collections, "The Art of the Knock" and "Interior Design," and the novel "How to Read an Unwritten Language"; and co-author of "Parallel Worlds," which won the 1993 Victor Turner Prize.

Graham's fiction has been published in The New Yorker, North American Review, Fiction, Missouri Review, Western Humanities Review, and Crab Orchard Review, and his essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post and Chicago Tribune. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Illinois Arts Council.

Graham is professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is also the fiction editor of Ninth Letter, a journal of literature and the arts.

"Every surviving witness to the attack on the World Trade Center was altered inside in some way by that violence," Graham has written. "However, once inside, those images of destruction fit differently in each individual. It is as if the planes' highjackers had injected a personalized poison into the witnesses to their crime as frighteningly easy as the planes passing into the towers. Such private effects of violence are what my novel seeks to examine, however public its stage might appear to be. Though set primarily in lower Manhattan, the true location of 'Dreaming the Towers' is the altered inner landscapes of the characters."