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July 9, 2001
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Annual festival presents Proulx, Grimsley By Deb Hammacher
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Pulitzer Prize-winning author E. Annie Proulx will be the focus of the
2001 Emory Creative Writing Program’s Summer Writers’ Festival. Proulx received the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1994
for The Shipping News, described by The New York Times as
a work that “displays Ms. Proulx’s surreal humor and her zest
for the strange foibles of humanity... Her inventive language is finely,
if exhaustively, accomplished.” Proulx will read from her work, discuss her techniques and teach a master
class during the July 26–27 festival, held in conjunction with the
Emory Summer Writers’ Institute that runs July 3–Aug. 9. Proulx was the first woman to be honored with the PEN/ Faulkner Award
for Fiction, which she won in 1993 for her first novel, Postcards. Recent
works by Proulx include Accordion Crimes (1996) and the short story
collection Close Range, Wyoming Stories (1999). A highlight of the two-day festival will be a conversation between Proulx
and Jim Grimsley, senior resident fellow in creative writing at Emory.
Grimsley is an award-winning author and playwright whose credits include
the novels Winter Birds, Dream Boy, My Drowning and Comfort
and Joy. The playwright-in-residence at Atlanta’s 7 Stages Theater, Grimsley's
plays include Mr. Universe, White People, The Lizard
of Tarsus, The Decline and Fall of the Rest, The Borderland
and In Berlin. Grimsley was awarded athe 1993 Bryan Family Prize
for Drama by the Fellowship of Southern Writers for his distinguished
body of work as a playwright. The festival begins on July 26 at 4 p.m. with a conversation between
Proulx and Grimsley in 207 White Hall. At 8 p.m. Proulx will read from
her works, and a reception and book signing will follow in 208 White Hall.
All festival events are free and open to the public. For more information on the Summer Writers’ Institute or festival,
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