Lewis Nordan and the Heartbreaking Laughter of Transcendence and Hope: A Symposium

Writer Lewis "Buddy" Nordan will be the focus of the second annual Pebble Hill Books Symposium, scheduled for Jan. 23, 2009, in Auburn. An international slate of scholars and writers-including Nordan himself and his friend and colleague Clyde Edgerton-will convene to celebrate the much beloved author of four novels, three short story collections and a memoir.

The symposium, sponsored by the Caroline Marshall Draughon Center for the Arts & Humanities in the College of Liberal Arts and designed to showcase significant literary, arts and cultural figures with connections to Alabama, follows the successful 2008 symposium on writer and critic Albert Murray.

Details can be found here.



In addition to Edgerton, other writers include novelist and Professor of Creative Writing at Florida International U, John Dufresne, poet Jo McDougall, and Lee Martin, Chair of Creative Writing at the Ohio State University.  Scholars Manuel Broncano of University of Leon, Spain, Edward Dupuy, Dean of Savannah College of Art & Design, Robert Rudnicki, Louisiana Tech., Mary Carney, Georgia State, and Roberta Maguire, U of Wisconsin Oshkosh will join Barbara Baker and Constance Relihan of Auburn University.  The program will be of interest to scholars, students and the general public.

Nordan, a 1973 AU graduate (Ph.D., English), served as writer-in-residence for the University of Pittsburgh until his retirement in 2005. He is best known for the comically heartbreaking collection Music of the Swamp (1987), which won the Porter Fund Prize, a best fiction award from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters and a Notable Fiction award from the American Library Institute of Arts and Letters. In Music of the Swamp Nordan developed his signature gift for transforming memories from his southern childhood into magnificent and magical tales of transcendence and hope. His many other awards include the Southern Book Award, the  Gould Fletcher Award for fiction and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts

Last years' Pebble Hill Books Symposium, Albert Murray and the Aesthetic Imagination of a Nation, can be viewed online at http://itunes.auburn.edu or at the Center's This Goodly Land blog entry at http://alabamaliterarymap.blogspot.com/2208/07/albert-murray-symposium-online.html.  The Murray symposium has also been revised and expanded into a volume by the same name available soon from Pebble Hill Books. The Nordan symposium will result in a similar volume.