Novelist and visiting professor Richard Price will read from a work-in-progress Monday, March 12, at 4:30 p.m. in the A.D. White House on the Cornell University campus. The reading is free and open to the public.

When Price '71, attended Cornell, Goldwin Smith Hall (where the writing faculty held court) was for him a young writer's Valhalla; the hall's old Temple of Zeus the arena where he first went public with his talents. The tranquil A.D. White House where Price will read is no Temple of Zeus of yore, but then the campus zeitgeist has changed profoundly since Price's undergraduate days, he said.

The award-winning novelist and screenwriter is a visiting professor of creative writing at Cornell with an office in Goldwin Smith he rarely has time to occupy. But his Cornell appointment satisfies a yearning Price has had since he left Cornell: to return here as a successful author and claim his place among the writers whom he once venerated.

Price is author of the best-selling novel Clockers , which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and adapted for a film directed by Spike Lee, with whom Price wrote the screenplay. While majoring in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell`, Price pursued creative writing courses. He received 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. His other novels include The Wanderers, Blood Brothers and Ladies Man ; his screenplays include Sea of Love, Kiss of Death and The Color of Money , for which he received an Oscar nomination.