Writer Clint McCown will present "Finding Your Way Through the Dark Woods: How Novels Come into Being" in a Bluffton University Forum at 11 a.m. Tuesday, March 29, in Founders Hall. Part of Bluffton's 27th annual English Festival, the forum is free and open to the public.

McCown is the guest author at the festival, an event for high school sophomores, juniors and seniors who visit the university for a day of literary and writing activities, including workshops and discussion with Bluffton faculty and the featured writer.

Author of several novels and volumes of poems, McCown has won the American Fiction Prize twice and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize three times.

As a journalist, he has received the Associated Press Award for Documentary Excellence for his investigations of organized crime and political corruption. Currently a professor and director of creative writing at Virginia Commonwealth University, he has also been a playwright, editor of several national literary magazines, a screenwriter for Warner Brothers and an actor for the National Shakespeare Company.