PAGES : Writers Harvest for the Homeless

Frederick Busch, author of 17 books and a member of Colgate University’s English department, says he lives in “a kind of paradise: 127 acres of wild, rough ridge land about 260 miles north of Manhattan.”

One day, in the rural nirvana of Sherburne, N.Y., Busch saw an old man pushing a supermarket cart teeming with his life’s possessions.

Jolted out of his bucolic complacency, the author realized that paradise is “right next door to homelessness.”

That’s how Busch came to organize the Writers Harvest for the Homeless, a national reading by almost 200 authors that will take place on college campuses and at bookstores across the country on Sept. 22.

(In Los Angeles, for example, Gloria Naylor will read at 7 p.m. at Dutton’s Books in Brentwood.)

Proceeds will be distributed by Share Our Strength, a Washington-based organization that raises money for hunger relief.

The event will occur on the first day of fall--and, coincidentally, the day of this year’s first presidential debate.

Busch says he hopes the national reading will raise debate of another kind.