The Visiting Writer’s Series announces the visit of the fiction writer and memoirist Monica Wood on Feb. 25.

In collaboration with the Center for Religion and Culture, the reading will take place from 7:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. in the Maloney Room.

An acclaimed author, Monica Wood was born and raised in Mexico by a single mom due to her dad’s unexpected death when she was nine years old. In spite of these circumstances, Wood left Mexico around 1972 to study at Georgetown University.

Since then, she has become one of those rare writers who have the ability to write a story both moving and entertaining yet utterly brilliant to transmit her feelings. She will share the story that changed her entire life that fateful morning of April 25, 1963 in “When We Were the Kennedys,” a memoir that came out last summer.

Through the release of this last novel, Wood has finally used her entire memories to create an emotional and dramatic account of one of the most life-changing experiences that a child can suffer, the loss of a parent.

For her, writing is not only an escape to imagine another, exhilarating, world, but also she uses it as a way to play rendition to her family and their traditions.

”If I have any obsessions as a writer, it’s the notion of the family into which we were born: the collection of people who accompanied us, for better or worse, through the process of learning how to find our way into the world.”

She is the author of five novels, including her short story “Ernie’s Ark,” which won the 1999 Pushcart Prize. Additionally, Wood has written numerous short stories that have appeared in publications such as “The Best American Mystery Stories,” and “Sudden Fiction International.”

Monica will be presented by one of her former colleagues, Professor Alan. J. Altimont, who is an Associate Professor here at St. Edward’s University. Both of them attended the same university, meeting in 1973 when Altimont joined one of the two magazines of the school and she was the editor of both.

“I was her assistant editor,” Altimont said, “From all the people I knew, she stood out.  Even back then, she was talented in all kind of things.”