Richard Horan, award-winning fiction writer and educator, will be the featured speaker of the Dr. Max Pickerill Lecture Series at Colby Community College on Tuesday, April 10, beginning at 7 p.m. in the Northwest Kansas Cultural Arts Center.

Horan has lived and taught all over the world. His most recent job was as a writing instructor at the State University of New York at Oswego. Prior to that, he taught English in the Wisconsin public school system and overseas with the Department of Defense.

He was stationed in Belgium and South Korea. Horan has also worked as a Sports Information Director and as an adjunct ESL, writing and journalism instructor at numerous colleges in New England. He also lived and taught for two years in a private school in Parma, Italy.

After graduating from Boston University in 1981 he traveled throughout the United States before settling in Milwaukee, Wis. While living in Milwaukee, he wrote extensively and worked as a nurse’s aide in a mental hospital. It was that experience that gave him the material to write his first published novel Life in the Rainbow. During college he worked as a night-time orderly in a Boston hospital and during the same period of time he fought professionally throughout the United States and Canada as a middleweight boxer.

He is married with two daughters ages 22 and 18. He and his wife worked as family-care providers for cognitively disabled adults who lived with them in their home.

His first novel published by Steerforth Press in 1996 was lauded by reviewers as a moving book written by an original voice. His latest work, SEEDS: One Man’s Serendipitous Journey to Find the Trees that Inspired Famous American Writers from Faulkner to Kerouac, Welty to Wharton, was published by Harper Collins and has received extraordinary endorsements and press.

Horan received his bachelor’s degree from Boston University and his Master of Arts in Teaching from the University of Pittsburgh.

Horan will be available to sign copies of his books following the lecture series. There is no charge to attend. The Max Pickerill Lecture Series is funded annually by anonymous donors. For more information contact Dr. Linda Davis-Stephens at (785) 460-5528.