Michael Knight and Allen Wier join moderator Steve Paul of The Kansas City Star for the December talk in the Library’s Writers at Work series on Thursday, December 4, at 7 p.m. at the Central Library, 14 W. 10th St.

The 2008-09 Writers at Work series features writers who will discuss their own work as well as the art of teaching the craft.

Knight and Wier are southern novelists and professors at the University of Tennessee.

Knight’s latest book, The Holiday Season, is his follow-up to Goodnight, Nobody. The New York Times Book Review said Knight has a “rare power to make a setting breathe, to invest it with a vitality that seems as authentic and intense as the pulsebeats of his characters.” Knight’s fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Playboy, Esquire, GQ, Story, and The New Yorker.

Wier is the author of Tehano, a sprawling epic set in the years just before and after the Civil War. The Dallas Morning News called Tehano “a terrific novel, an epic tale of the Western frontier that is superior to Lonesome Dove.” Wier’s work has been published in Southern Review, Georgia Review, and The New York Times.

The books of both authors will be available for sale, and they will sign copies purchased during the event.

Writers at Work is organized by Kansas City novelist Whitney Terrell and co-sponsored by Chris Davis and the English Department at UMKC.