Award-winning author Steve Yarbrough, who holds an endowed professorship of English at California State University, Fresno, will sign copies of his new book, “Prisoners of War” ($23, Alfred A. Knopf) at 7 p.m. on Feb. 18 at Barnes & Noble, 7849 N. Blackstone Ave. in Fresno.

The novel, Yarbrough’s third, has drawn strong reviews from Publisher’s Weekly, Library Journal and Kirkus Reviews, which calls it “philosophically troubling, artistically thrilling, and thoroughly impressive.”

The WWII-era novel explores questions of morality and social inequity in the rural South when a group of German POWs are quartered at a local camp and sent to work as day laborers on nearby farms.

Yarbrough, who joined the Fresno State faculty in 1988, has received several awards in recent years, including the California Book Award from the Commonwealth Club of California in 2000 and the John and Renee Grisham Visiting Southern Writer-in¬Residence at the University of Mississippi in 1999-2000.

After establishing a national reputation as a short-story writer, Yarbrough published his first novel, “The Oxygen Man” in 1999. His second, the critically acclaimed “Visible Spirits,” was published in 2001.

In April 2001, an anonymous donor endowed a professorship for Yarbrough to lighten his teaching load and allow him to spend more time on his writing.