SHIPPENSBURG, Wednesday, Jan. 18 — Novelist Adam Johnson will speak on North Korea Feb. 15 at Shippensburg University.

The program, free and open to the public, is at 6:30 p.m. in Old Main Chapel. It is sponsored by the Department of English and The Reflector, the undergraduate literary journal.

Dr. Johnson is an associate professor of English at Stanford University. His talk, “Inside North Korea,” will draw from the extensive research that went into his new novel The Orphan Master’s Son. The book was recently featured on NPR, and it was hailed by the New York Times as “a daring and remarkable novel, a novel that not only opens a frightening window on the mysterious kingdom of North Korea, but one that also excavates the very meaning of love and sacrifice.”

At Stanford, Johnson’s emphasis is in creative writing. A Whiting Writers’ Award winner, his fiction has appeared in Esquire, Harper’s, Playboy, Paris Review, Tin House and Best American Short Stories. He is the author of Emporium, a short-story collection, and the novel Parasites Like Us, which won a California Book Award.

His books have been translated into French, Dutch, Japanese, Catalan, German, Spanish, Italian, Hebrew, Polish, Portuguese and Serbian. Johnson is a 2010 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow.

For information, contact the English department at 477-1495.