March 19, 2001Media Contact: David Glasgow, (615) 322-2706[email protected]
Vanderbilt writers symposium features four from Nashville
NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- Four award-winning authors will be featured at Vanderbilt's spring writers symposium titled "Our Favorite Year: A Celebration of Nashville Writers." John Egerton, Ann Patchett, Alice Randall and Diann Blakely will read excerpts from their books and entertain questions from the audience Saturday, March 30, in 103 Wilson Hall. Randall and Blakely will present at 10:30 a.m. with Egerton and Patchett presenting at 2 p.m.
"I can't imagine another city having as good a literary year as Nashville," said event chair Tony Earley, writer and assistant professor of English at Vanderbilt.
Egerton is the award-winning author of numerous books and more than 200 magazine articles including Southern Food: At Home, On the Road, in History and Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement, which won the John F. Kennedy Book Award, the Southern Book Critics Award in non-fiction in 1995 and the Nashville Banner Tennessee Writer Award. Considered by many the dean of Nashville writers, Egerton recently co-edited Nashville: An American Self-Portrait.
Patchett is the author of the novels The Patron Saint of Liars, Taft, The Magician's Assistant and Bel Canto. Patchett's earlier work earned the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for the best work of fiction in 1994, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Nashville Banner Tennessee Writer of the Year Award. Her most recent work, Bel Canto, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and is a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award.
Randall, screenwriter, songwriter and author, overcame an injunction brought by the estate of Margaret Mitchell to publish her satire The Wind Done Gone. After the landmark copyright case was settled in Randall's favor, the book quickly became a best seller and was one of the most talked about books of the past year. The only African-American woman to write a No. 1 country song, Randall has also had more than 20 songs recorded, including two Top 10 records and a Top 40.
Blakely, a Vanderbilt alumna, is the author of the poetry collections Hurricane Walk and Farwell, My Lovelies. Her current book, Cities of Flesh and the Dead, to be published by Story Line Press, was recipient of the Poetry Society of America's di Castagnola Award in 2001.
This annual symposium is sponsored by the Gertrude and Harold S. Vanderbilt Visiting Writers Program and the Vanderbilt Department of English. The program is free and open to the public.
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NOTE: A digital photo of Egerton is available via e-mail at: [email protected]
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