Award-winning author to speak at Joyner Library banquet
Allan Gurganus, acclaimed author of “Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All,” will be the keynote speaker for the Friends of Joyner Library’s annual spring banquet scheduled for 6 p.m., April 30.
Allan Gurganus
Gurganus is also the author of “White People” (Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Pen-Faulkner Finalist), “Plays Well with Others,” “The Practical Heart: Four Novellas” (Lambda Literary Award) and 2013’s “Local Souls.” His stories have won the National Magazine Prize and have been honored in “Best American Stories,” “The O’Henry Prize Collection” and “The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction.”
The writer’s essays and editorials appear in The New York Times and the New York Review of Books. He was featured in the PBS “American Masters” series as a scholar-reader for “Walt Whitman, An American.” Gurganus wrote and narrated the script “A House Divided: Poetry of the American Civil War” for BBC 4.
The CBS version of “Widow” won four Emmys. The writer was a recent John Simon Guggenheim Fellow and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Gurganus has taught literature and writing at Duke University, The Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Stanford University, and Sarah Lawrence College.
“Allan Gurganus is one of our state’s most gifted authors and storytellers,” said Janice Lewis, interim dean of Joyner Library. “I am thrilled that he will share his insights with us. I started reading ‘Local Souls’ last night and was completely captivated by the characters and the town of Falls, North Carolina.”
This year’s banquet will be held at Yankee Hall and the program will honor lifetime Friends of Joyner Library member and library benefactor, the late Ann Rhem Schwarzmann. Tickets may be purchased ($35 members, $45 non-member) at http://tinyurl.com/friendsbanquet or 328-6514.
The Friends of Joyner Library is a non-profit organization that provides support to the library, which serves the university and region.
For more information, contact Dawn Wainwright at 328-4090.