Award-Winning Author Alice McDermott to Speak on Campus

Posted on Feb. 19, 2008

National and American Book Award winner Alice McDermott, author of six novels, will give a free public reading at 7:30 p.m. Feb. 26 in Hill Hall at UNC.

McDermott, the Richard A. Macksey Professor of the humanities in writing seminars at Johns Hopkins University, will be this year’s Morgan Writer-in-Residence at UNC. Her visit is sponsored by the Morgan Program and the department of English and comparative literature in the College of Arts and Sciences.

McDermott also will join UNC Professors Doris Betts and Ruel Tyson for a panel discussion on “Religion and Fiction” Feb. 27 at 3 p.m. in the Pleasants Family Assembly Room in Wilson Library. This event is also free and open to the public.

McDermott’s latest book, After This, was a finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize and a nominee for the International Impac Dublin Literary Award. A New York Times bestseller, After This was named one of the best books of 2006 by The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Rocky Mountain News, Fresh Air’s (NPR) Maureen Corrigan and The Atlantic Monthly.

It was her fourth novel, New York Times bestseller Charming Billy, that won the 1998 National Book Award for fiction, as well as the American Book Award.

Child of My Heart (2002), her fifth novel, was a Book-of-the-Month Club Main Selection, a New York Times Notable Book, one of Book Magazine‘s Ten Best Novels of 2002 and a nominee for the Dublin award.

McDermott’s second and third novels, That Night (1987) and At Weddings and Wakes (1992), were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. That Night also was nominated for the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and The PEN/Faulkner Award.

Her articles, reviews and stories have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, Redbook, Ms. and Commonweal.

Carolina alumni Allen ’65 and Musette Morgan ’76 of Memphis, Tenn., established the Morgan Writer-in-Residence Program in 1993 to bring writers of distinction to UNC. Previous Morgan Writers have included the late Shelby Foote ’39, Russell Banks ’67, Joan Didion, Annie Dillard, Rita Dove, Robert Hass, Beth Henley, Tim O’Brien, Robert Pinsky, Calvin Trillin, John Edgar Wideman and Richard Wilbur.

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