Award-winning novelist and screenwriter Richard Price, Cornell University Class of 1971, returns to his alma mater to read from his fiction Thursday, April 27, at 7:30 p.m. in Goldwin Smith Hall's Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium. The event is free and open to the public.

Thirty years ago Price, then an undergraduate in Cornell's School of Industrial and Labor Relations, was enrolled in several writing courses and gave readings of his fiction in the old Temple of Zeus in Goldwin Smith Hall.

"Price has such an ear for the voices of the inner city," said Robert Morgan, Cornell professor of English, who attended Price's readings in the 1970s. "I remember being struck by the life in his prose."

Price went on to receive an M.F.A. from Columbia University, a Mirillees Fellowship in fiction at Stanford University and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has taught fiction writing at Yale, Columbia and New York universities and served on the PEN executive committee.

The Bronx native is the author of the best-selling novel Clockers, which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and was adapted for a film directed by Spike Lee, with whom Price wrote the screenplay. Following the success of Clockers, Price gave a public reading and a talk at Cornell in 1996, a visit that included a screening of the movie.

Price's articles have appeared in the New York Times, Esquire, Village Voice, Playboy and Rolling Stone, among other publications. Besides Clockers, his novels include The Wanderers, Blood Brothers and Ladies Man, Three Screenplays and most recently, Freedomland; his screenplays include Sea of Love, Kiss of Death and The Color of Money, for which he received an Oscar nomination.

Price's talk is being presented byCornell's Creative Writing Program and Epoch magazine. For more information, call the Epoch office at (607) 255-3385.