Writers Leslie Epstein, Anthony Kellman, Carol Lee Lorenzo and Charles McNair will read from their works and discuss the writing craft during Emory's three days of events. Offered as part of its Summer Writers' Institute, a for-credit Emory College fiction-writing class, the Summer Writers' Festival offerings are free and open to the public.
Kennesaw State College associate professor Anthony Grooms again will direct the institute and moderate the festival events. A National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Administration fellow, Grooms has taught writing for more than a decade. He is the author of Trouble No More, a collection of stories, and Ice Poems, a poetry chapbook.
Epstein was born into a family of screenwriters. His father and uncle wrote Casablanca, Yankee Doodle Dandy and Arsenic and Old Lace, among other distinguished screenplays. He graduated from Yale University, attended Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar and earned graduate degrees from the University of California-Los Angeles and Yale Drama School. For many years, he has directed the creative writing program at Boston University. Author of King of the Jews, a work of black humor that has become a classic novel about the Holocaust, Epstein set the story in Poland after the German invasion. Other works of fiction include Goldkorn Tales, The Steinway Quintet Plus Four, and his most recent, Pinto and Sons. Among his many awards are Fulbright, Guggenheim and NEA fellowships, and an award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
Kellman, born in Barbados, performed folk music in London nightclubs as a young man before coming to the United States to earn a doctorate from Louisiana State University. He has published three books of poems, including The Watercourse; has recorded a tape of poetry and folk music, Surf Poems; and has edited an anthology, Crossing Water: Contemporary Poetry of the English-Speaking Caribbean. His first novel, The Coral Rooms, was published in 1993. A professor of writing and literature at Augusta College, Kellman is a 1993 recipient of an NEA Fellowship.
Lorenzo, a native of Florida, studied in New York City at The New School for Social Research and New York University. She has published three novels for young adults with Harper and Row, and her stories have been seen in Primavera, Pennsylvania Review and the St. Andrews Quarterly. Her first collection of short stories, Nervous Dancer, was published by The University of Georgia Press (1995). The collection won the 1995 Flannery O'Connor Short Fiction Award, one of the most prestigious national short fiction prizes. Lorenzo currently teaches at Callanwolde Fine Arts Center in Atlanta.
For his 40th birthday, McNair had a banjo tattooed on his knee. "Now," the Dothan, Ala., native says, "I can tell people I come from Alabama with a banjo on my knee." Before settling in Atlanta, McNair, an employee of BellSouth, hitchiked in Mexico, played for an Italian baseball league and reported for an alternative newspaper in Mobile, Ala. He began writing his first novel, Land O' Goshen, 14 years ago while living in Italy. The novel has been praised for its fast pace and witty language.
Dates, times and festival events are as follows, all in 206 White Hall:
* 8 p.m., Tuesday, July 18 -- reading by Kellman
* 4 p.m., Wednesday, July 19 -- panel discussion, "Utopia and Holocaust: Politics and the American Writer" with Epstein, Kellman, Lorenzo and McNair and moderated by Grooms
* 8 p.m., Wednesday, July 19 -- Reading by Lorenzo and McNair
* 8 p.m., Thursday, July 20 -- reading by Epstein
For information on the festival or the institute, call 727-4683.
-- Joyce Bell