Author, Alumna to Attend St. Lawrence University Writers Series

CANTON, N.Y. - April 22, 2014 - PRLog -- The St. Lawrence University Writers Series will conclude its 2013-14 season with alumna Lorrie Moore ’78 at 8 p.m. on Monday, April 28, in the Common Room of Sykes Residence Hall. This event is free and open to the public.

Moore’s writing career began while she was a student at St. Lawrence. At the age of 19, she wrote a short story that won first prize in a contest sponsored by Seventeen magazine and thus launched her career.

Since that time, Moore has written four collections of short stories, Self-Help, Like Life, Birds of America, and The Collected Stories; three novels, Anagrams, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, and A Gate at the Stairs; and a children’s novel, The Forgotten Helper. Her newest collection of stories Bark was published in February.

A native of Glens Falls, N.Y., Moore’s first short story collection, Self-Help, inspired countless writers to mimic her narratives-as-series-of-instructions. In her first novel, Anagrams, Benna Carpenter seeks to remake the world by rearranging the letters that constitute it. The stories of her later collections, Like Life and Birds of America, are poised between the naturalistic and the surreal, and the protagonists of her recent novels, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? and A Gate at the Stairs, inhabit similarly liminal spaces.

Moore’s stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Harper’s, The Atlantic, Best American Short Stories, The Yale Review, The New York Review of Books and The New York Times, and she edited Best American Short Stories 2004. Her collection of short stories, Birds of America, was a National Book Critics’ Circle Award Finalist and the winner of both the O. Henry Award and The Irish Times International Fiction Prize. She has edited several anthologies and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001 and the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2006.

A 1978 Phi Beta Kappa graduate of St. Lawrence majoring in English, Moore received an honorary degree, Doctor of Literature, from St. Lawrence in 2004. She earned a master’s of fine arts degree from Cornell University and taught from 1984 to 2013 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she held the Delmore Schwartz Professorship in the Humanities. Moore is currently the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn.

For more information, contact St. Lawrence's Department of English at 315-229-5125.

About St. Lawrence University:

Founded in 1856, St. Lawrence University is a private, independent liberal arts institution of about 2,400 students located in Canton, N.Y. The educational opportunities at St. Lawrence inspire students and prepare them to be critical and creative thinkers, to find a compass for their lives and careers, and to pursue knowledge and understanding for the benefit of themselves, humanity and the planet. Through its focus on active engagement with ideas in and beyond the classroom, a St. Lawrence education leads students to make connections that transform lives and communities, from the local to the global. Visit http://www.stlawu.edu.