Cynthia Ozick, a major American writer of fiction and essays, will give a reading of her recent work "Who Owns Anne Frank?" at 7 p.m. Thursday, May 11, at UNCA's Owen Conference Center. The reading is free and open to the public.

Ozick's 1997 New Yorker magazine article "Who Owns Anne Frank?" promotes the diary as a sacred text and condemns any tamperers. The passions the book ignites suggest that everyone owns Anne Frank, that she has risen above the Holocaust, Judaism, girlhood and even goodness to become a totemic figure of the modern world--the moral individual mind beset by the machinery of destruction, insisting on the right to live and question and hope for the future of human beings.

"A story may not be said to be a story if the end is missing. And because the end is missing, the story of Anne Frank in the fifty years since 'The Diary of a Young Girl' was first published has been bowdlerized, distorted, transmuted, traduced, reduced; it has been infantilized, Americanized, homogenized, sentimentalized; falsified, kitschified, and, in fact, blatantly and arrogantly denied," said Ozick.

Ozick is the author of many widely acclaimed works of fiction, including "The Shawl," "The Puttermesser Papers" and "The Pagan Rabbi." She has also published three collections of essays, "Art & Ardor," "Metaphor & Memory," and "Fame & Folly," and is a regular contributor to The New Yorker magazine. Ozick has received many prestigious awards, including the Jewish Theological Seminary's Distinguished Jewish Letters Award, the National Jewish Book Council Award for Distinguished Literary Contribution, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Strauss Living Award.