LAURINBURG—The critically acclaimed book “The High Heart” by Appalachian State University professor Joseph Bathanti has been selected for the summer reading assignment for incoming freshmen at St. Andrews Presbyterian College.

Bathanti will appear in Laurinburg in September and meet with area residents and students at St. Andrews as part of the college’s community Reading Program.

Bathanti is a former faculty member at St. Andrews and currently a professor in Appalachian’s Department of English.

Winner of the 2006 Spokane Prize for Short Fiction, “The High Heart” contains stories linked by heartbreakingly vivid characters headed by the young Fritz Sweeny and his volatile and eccentric parents. The setting is Pittsburgh in the 1960s and ’70s, when the city still lay in the trough of industrial collapse. Through the painfully honest perplexity of Fritz, readers are given a clear view of the family, the neighborhood, the city and the era.

“I was thunderstruck,” said Bathanti upon hearing the news his book had been selected. “A writer likes to believe that folks actually read his book, but to be assured of a readership that a program like this guarantees is a dream come true. As much as anything, I was absolutely taken unawares.”

The Community Reading Program at St. Andrews provides a common text for students, parents and community members that will be read, studied, discussed, debated and written about in classrooms, dorm rooms, family rooms, and library reading rooms throughout the area.

Bathanti grew up in Pittsburgh and moved to North Carolina in 1976 as a VISTA volunteer in the state’s prison system. He is the author of four books of poetry, the most recent of which, “This Metal,” was nominated for the National Book Award, as well as two novels, “East Liberty” and “Coventry,” for which he received the 2006 Novello Literary Award.

“More than anything, I feel honored,” said Bathanti, “not only that the book garnered this kind of attention, but that St. Andrews, a college that I not only taught at for a year, but a place that I hold in great esteem as one of the last outposts of what a true liberal education embodies, was the college that chose ‘The High Heart’.”

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