HUNTINGTON, W.Va. – Popular fiction writer Andrew (A.J.) Hartley will conduct a public reading of his work when he visits Marshall University Thursday, April 4.

Hartley’s appearance at Marshall represents the finale of this year’s A.E. Stringer Visiting Writers Series. His reading will take place at 7 p.m. in Smith Hall 154, with a book signing immediately following. The event is free to the public.

Hartley received his B.A. from Manchester University (UK), and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Boston University in 1996, where he established Willing Suspension Productions, a student theatre group specializing in non-Shakespearean Renaissance drama.

He currently teaches in the theatre department at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte and is the director of UNC-Charlotte’s Shakespeare in Action Centre, which is currently engaged in an ambitious project to stage an event connected to each of Shakespeare’s plays by the 400th anniversary of his death in April 2016.

Hartley also publishes best-selling popular fiction as A.J. Hartley. Critics have compared Hartley to DaVinci Code author Dan Brown for the way history and research underpin his mysteries and grip his readers in a page-turning spell.

Prior to his public reading, Hartley will conduct a class visit at Marshall, as well as at Milton Middle School, to discuss and read from his best-selling young adult novel, Darwen Arkwright and the Peregrine Pact (2011). The book transports readers to a secret world that its protagonist, 11-year-old Darwen Arkwright, accidentally discovers through an old and mysterious mirror.