Fighting hunger has never been more entertaining or easy than it will be today in the Maintenance Shop in the Memorial Union.

The local reading for the Share Our Strength’s Writers Harvest will take place to fight hunger nationwide. Performing will be ISU English professors Joe Geha and Mary Swander and a student poetic duo, Raised by Cats.

This is the fourth annual Writers Harvest, sponsored by American Express, and the nation’s largest literary event. There are more than 1,000 writers doing readings at over 300 bookstores and campuses nationwide.

Some of these authors include Paul Auster, Rita Dove, Susan Issacs, Elmore Leonard and Alice McDermott. Richard Russo, author of Nobody’s Fool, is the national chair for the event.

The authors will be reading their own work, and the fact that these authors were chosen was “very appropriate,” said Aimee Houser, co-coordinator of the effort in Ames and a graduate student in English.

Houser said that Mary Swander talks about her experiences in her book Out of This World. Swander’s experiences include an environmental illness that once brought the author to catching and eating frogs so she could avoid pesticides.

Geha will read his new short story “Homesickness,” and “in a sense” he knows what homelessness is like, since he is an immigrant, Houser said. The duo Raised by Cats are ISU students and very talented, Houser said.

“By organizing or going to a Writers Harvest event, our young people are learning that hunger is still a problem in the United States and that there’s something they can do about it.

Even something as simple as attending a reading can turn a person into a hunger activist,” said Bill Shore, founder and executive director of Share Our Strength, in a press release.

The money collected will be donated locally, and in the past has gone to food banks, Houser said.

The suggested ticket price for the reading is $5 per person. The donation includes a ticket in a raffle where the prizes are books by nationally known authors, including Swander and Geha.

Houser said that each of the three artists will perform for 20 minutes, and there will be an open microphone after the event for other people to come and read some of their own works.