Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author Robert Olen Butler Will Give a Reading at Bard College on Monday, March 7

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.— Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, will read from his work at Bard College on Monday, March 7. “I’ll never stop believing it: Robert Olen Butler is the best living American writer, period,” wrote Jeff Guinn, former books editor and senior writer for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Butler will be introduced by novelist and Bard literature professor Bradford Morrow. The reading, presented as part of Morrow’s New Directions in Contemporary Fiction course, takes place at 2:30 p.m. in Weis Cinema in the Bertelsmann Campus Center. It is free and open to the public; no reservations are required.

Robert Olen Butler has published 11 novels—The Alleys of Eden, Sun Dogs, Countrymen of Bones, On Distant Ground, Wabash, The Deuce, They Whisper, The Deep Green Sea, Mr. Spaceman, Fair Warning, and Hell—and five volumes of short fiction: Tabloid Dreams, Had a Good Time, Severance, Intercourse, and A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, which won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He also published a volume of his lectures on the creative process, From Where You Dream, edited with an introduction by Janet Burroway. Butler is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, has twice won the National Magazine Award in Fiction, and has received two Pushcart Prizes. His stories have appeared widely in such publications as The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, Atlantic Monthly, Paris Review, and Conjunctions. They have also been chosen for inclusion in four annual editions of The Best American Short Stories, eight annual editions of New Stories from the South, and numerous college literature textbooks.

Butler’s works have been translated into 18 languages. He was a charter recipient of the Tu Do Chinh Kien Award, given by the Vietnam Veterans of America for “outstanding contributions to American culture by a Vietnam veteran.” Since 1995 he has written feature-length screenplays for New Regency, Twentieth-Century Fox, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Disney, Universal Pictures, Baldwin Entertainment Group (for Robert Redford), and two teleplays for HBO. He is the Francis Eppes Distinguished Professor holding the Michael Shaara Chair in Creative Writing at Florida State University. He lives in Capps, Florida, which has a population of one.

For more information about this event or to be placed on the Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series e-mail list, contact murphy@bard.edu or call 845-752-4933.

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(2.10.11)

This event was last updated on 02-15-2011

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