In the confines of a small climate-controlled room, across an expansive wooden table, her eyes whispered a quiet fierceness.

"I have a liking for being different," Jeannette Lander said. She is talking about her accent.

"I don’t like to speak like a Southerner and I don’t like to speak like a Northerner," she said. "I don’t want to speak German like an American or English like a German."

If anything, Lander said she tries to reduce the amount of accent in her speech. But Lander has spoken in different modes of speech all of her life. As an internationally renowned writer who has published poetry, short stories, essays, novels and produced and directed 11 documentary films, she describes herself as "an American-German writer of Polish-Jewish origin."

For the first two weeks in October, Landers is a guest at the University as a Center for Humanities and Arts Visiting Artist and Scholar. While she is here she will give workshops and lectures and read selected passages from her most recent novel, "Robert," published in 1998.

Lander will give public readings of her novel, Robert, on Oct. 4 and Oct. 9 from 7:30 to 9:00 p.m. at Sanford Hall. She will be at the University through Oct. 15.

Martin Kagel, an assistant professor in German in the department of German and Slavic languages, said he personally felt Lander’s visit was a very important event for the University.

Born in 1931 in New York City, Lander’s family moved to Atlanta in 1934, where she grew up in the era of legalized segregation.

Her first novel, "Ein Sommer in der Woche der Itke K." (A Summer in the Week of Itke K.), is set in 1940s Atlanta and describes a young Jewish teenager’s experiences in a segregated city during WWII.

As are all her novels, "Itke K." was written in German, but when it was published in 1971, it translated black dialect into German.

As a child, Lander said she was friends with African-American girls who worked for her family and sometimes took her to black churches. But she said the key to learning and communicating the dialect is listening.

"You have to hear the lilt and the melody and then disregard all grammatical misfortunes and mishaps you might encounter," Lander said.

"Itke K." is one of three novels Lander wrote that emphasized her background, Kagel said.

In 1960, she moved to West Berlin and, with the exception of spending one year in Sri Lanka, has lived there ever since.

Her lastest novel describes East-West relationships in contemporary Germany. But on the 10th anniversary of reunification of Germany, Lander said she felt the country was still not unified.

"We have completely different backgrounds and completely different sets of values," Lander said. "I think we should go on living our identities in the East and in the West."

Currently Lander lives in East Berlin, where she has had a home for the last seven years.

"I like the East better because they care for each other more," Lander said.