Pulitzer Prize-winning author Marilynne Robinson to speak at SMU

DALLAS (SMU) — Marilynne Robinson, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead and heralded as one of this era’s most acclaimed novelists, will be at SMU Oct. 25-26 to speak at two events sponsored by the Department of English in Dedman College of Humanities & Sciences.

Robinson will give a lecture Oct. 26 at the Hughes-Trigg Theater (lower level) at 6:30 p.m., with a reception beginning at 6 p.m. The author also will sign books at the event, which is free and open to the public. To register for the lecture, which has limited seating available, RSVP online at www.smu.edu/english.

The Oct. 25 event at the DeGolyer Library is sold-out.

Robinson has penned such bestselling novels as Home (2008), Gilead (2004, winner of the Pulitzer Prize) and Housekeeping (1980). She also has written such nonfiction books as the autobiographical When I Was a Child I Read Books: Essays (2012), Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (2010), The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (1998) and Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State and Nuclear Pollution (1989).

“She is one of the foremost contemporary writers in the world today, not just because she is an elegant stylist or a fascinating storyteller, though she is both those things,” says Nina Schwartz, associate professor and chair of SMU’s Department of English. “More important, she is among the most interesting and beautiful writers working in English today because she’s a little bit out-of-style. Her stories are so quiet and surprisingly unassuming, but they compel attention and they break hearts at the same time that they are funny and unsentimentally hopeful.”

What’s more, notes Dedman College Associate Dean Peter Moore, “her fiction and non-fiction books often deal with religious themes, which should appeal to many in the Dallas community.”

An Idaho native, Robinson teaches at the prestigious University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop in Iowa City, where she now lives. She has written articles, essays and reviews for Harper’s Magazine, The Paris Review and The New York Times Book Review. She has been writer-in-residence or visiting professor at many universities, including the University of Kent, Amherst, and the University of Massachusetts AmherstMFA Program for Poets and Writers.

Click here for more event details, including a parking map.

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