AUTHOR ALLAN GURGANUS TO SPEAK MARCH 23: Acclaimed writer Allan Gurganus, author of the bestseller The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, White People and the recent Plays Well With Others (Vintage Books, 1999), will speak Friday, March 23, 2001, at 4:30 p.m. in Washington College's Norman James Theatre. He will read from his forthcoming work The Practical Heart, a group of four novellas to be published in August by Knopf.
Said Henry Louis Gates of Gurganus: "We writes without a safety net. He locates the dangerous glamour in ordinariness. Gurganus can do anything he likes as a writer." Gurganus' mentor, John Cheever, has said, "I consider Allan Gurganus the most technically gifted and morally responsive writer of his generation."
Guganus received the Sue Kaufman prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, the tale of a woman approaching her 100th birthday, reflecting on the experiences of her life, married to a Confederate veteran, in the culture and legacy of the American South. Gurganus also is the author of White People, an award-winning collection of stories and novellas.
Gurganus has taught at Stanford University, Duke University, the Iowa Writers' Workshop and Sarah Lawrence College. His short fiction has won the National Magazine Prize and is seen in the O. Henry Prize Collection, Best American Stories and The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. The CBS television adaptation of The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All received for Emmy awards, including Best Supporting Actress for Cicely Tyson.
The talk is sponsored by the Sophie Kerr Lecture Series. The event is free and the public is invited to attend. For further information, visit www.washcoll.edu.
(From a Washington College Press Release)
ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVIST TO SPEAK MARCH 7: Writer and environmental activist Janisse Ray will speak Wednesday, March 7, at 7:30 p.m. in the Litrenta Lecture Hall, Dunning Hall. The event is free and the public is invited to attend.
Ray is the author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, a remarkable first book that juxtaposes growing up as the daughter of a junkyard owner with the ecology of the Georgia longleaf pine ecosystem. Naming the Unseen, her chapbook of poetry about biology and place, won the 1996 Merriam-Frontier Award from the University of Montana. Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, published in 1999, is both a plea to protect and restore the native forests of the Southeast and an exploration of such topics as mental illness, poverty and fundamentalist Christianity in her Georgia community. Her work has garnered the Southeastern Booksellers Award for Nonfiction in 1999 and the Southern Environmental Law Center 2000 Award for Outstanding Writing on the Southern Environment.
As an environmental activist, Ray is working to slow the rate of logging of Southern forests. She is a founding board member of Altamaha Riverkeeper, a group dedicated to repairing the Altamaha River, and she has helped to form the Georgia Nature-Based Tourism Association.
Ray also will speak on Tuesday, March 6, 2001 at 7:30 p.m. at the Avalon Theatre in Easton, MD, as part of the 2001 Eastern Shore Lecture Series entitled "Journeys Home: People, Nature and Sense of Place," a subscription lecture series co-sponsored by the Washington College Center for the Environment and Society, the Adkins Arboretum, the Eastern Shore Land Conservancy, the Horsehead Wetlands Center and the Maryland Center for Agroecology.
For subscription information on the Eastern Shore Lecture Series, call Dr. Wayne H. Bell, Director of the Washington College Center for the Environment and Society, at 410-810-7171, or the Adkins Arboretum at 410-634-2847.
(From a Washington College Press Release)
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