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Esteemed Fiction Writer to Read in Center for Writers Visitors Series |
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Tuesday, February 24, 2009 |
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Contact Angela Kilcrease, 601.266.4988
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The University of Southern Mississippi Center for Writers will host a reading March 12 by prize-winning fiction writer Bobbie Ann Mason. The reading is the sixth of the Center for Writers’ 2008-09 Visiting Writers Series and will be held at 8 p.m. at Gonzales Auditorium in the Liberal Arts Building on the Hattiesburg campus.
Mason is one of the country's leading fiction writers. Born in Mayfield, Ky. in 1940, she grew up with her brother and sisters on the family’s dairy farm. “I never had much confidence,” she once recalled, “[but] I had a strong drive, and I was ambitious.” She later wrote, “As I picked blackberries or hoed vegetables in the scorching morning sun, I longed to travel and see the world.”
Mason went on to major in journalism at the University of Kentucky. She took several jobs in New York City with various movie magazines, writing articles about Annette Funicello, Troy Donahue, Fabian and other teen stars.
Mason, who still resides in Kentucky, attended graduate school at the University of Connecticut where she received her Ph.D. in literature. Her dissertation, a study of nature imagery in Nabakov’s “Ada,” was published as “Nabokov's Garden” and was followed by “The Girl Sleuth,” a feminist guide to Nancy Drew and her ilk. Mason taught at Pennsylvania's Mansfield College but left academia to become a full-time writer.
She is best known for her acutely observed short stories of working-class life in the New South, which began to appear in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly and other magazines in the early 1980s. The pop-culture milieu of strip malls, tract houses, fast-food joints and trash television characterizes her highly acclaimed first volume of stories, “Shiloh and Other Stories.”
In her 2007 biography, “Elvis Presley: A Life,” Mason brings a novelist’s insight to the mythic life of Elvis Presley. Capturing both the charismatic, boundary-breaking singer and the soft-spoken Southern boy who was unprepared for success, she creates a riveting, tragic portrait. The result is a tragic book that goes to the heart of the American dream.
She is the recipient of the Pen/Hemingway Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, among other honors. "It took me a long time to discover my material," she says. "It wasn't a matter of developing writing skills, it was a matter of knowing how to see things. And it took me a very long time to grow up. “I'd been writing for a long time, but was never able to see what there was to write about. I always aspired to things away from home, so it took me a long time to look back at home and realize that that's where the center of my thought was."
The Visiting Writers Series is one of the cornerstones of the Center for Writers and has brought more than 150 nationally regarded writers of literary fiction, nonfiction poetry to campus for the community’s benefit.
The Center for Writers is the graduate creative writing program at Southern Miss and is housed in the Department of English. The program has awarded more than 275 masters and doctoral degrees through the department since 1977, and was ranked in the top 10 percent of creative writing programs nationwide in a U.S. News & Business Report survey. Admission this event is free.
For more information, contact the Center for Writers at 601.266.5600 or visit the Web at www.usm.edu/arts.
About The University of Southern Mississippi
The University of Southern Mississippi, founded in 1910, is a comprehensive doctoral and research-extensive university fulfilling its mission of being a leading university in engaging and empowering individuals to transform lives and communities. In a tradition of leadership for student development, Southern Miss is educating a 21st century work force providing intellectual capital, cultural enrichment and innovation to Mississippi and the world. Southern Miss is located in Hattiesburg, Miss., with an additional campus and teaching and research sites on the Mississippi Gulf Coast; further information is found at www.usm.edu.
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