Tony Earley

Acclaimed fiction writer Tony Earley, visiting Washington University as a Fannie Hurst Professor of Creative Literature in the Department of English in Arts & Sciences, will read from his work at 8 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 28.

The talk, part of the Writing Program Reading Series, takes place in Hurst Lounge in Duncker Hall, Room 201, on the northwest corner of Brookings quadrangle on the Washington University campus. A reception will follow and copies of Earley’s books will be available for purchase. For more information, call (314) 935-7130.

Earley is the author of three books: Here We Are in Paradise (1994), a collection of short stories; Jim the Boy (2000), a novel; and Somehow Form a Family (2001), a collection of personal essays. Jim the Boy was featured on the cover of The New York Times Book Review and later named a Times‘ notable book for that year. It will soon be made into a “Hallmark Hall of Fame” motion picture. In 1996, Granta named Earley one of the “Best of Young American Novelists,” and in 1999 he was featured in The New Yorker as one of twenty writers to watch in the twenty-first century.

“‘Lucid’ is a word that critics like to attach to Tony Earley’s fiction, and he seems to me one of the contemporary writers who best earns it,” says Marshall Klimasewiski, assistant professor of English and a fiction writer on faculty with The Writing Program. “‘Lucid’ as in ‘free from what obscures or dims’; as in his talent for close observation, particularly of his rural North Carolina and the sorts of lives it has harbored and shaped over the better part of the past century; but also as in lucid prose: beautifully detailed and precise, subtle, and always perfectly formed to what it conveys, whether it’s the professional wrestling of 1980s Charlotte or the Depression-era, small-scale farming of his invented Aliceville. Everything in his fiction feels ‘earned,’ as they say, and he’s a master at quietly accumulating toward more than he’d let you anticipate.”

Born in San Antonio, Texas, Earley grew up in western North Carolina, an area that is often the setting for his fictional work. After graduating from Warren Wilson College, he worked as a newspaper feature writer and photographer for four years before entering graduate school at the University of Alabama, where he received his MFA in Creative Writing in 1992. Currently Earley is the Samuel Milton Fleming Associate Professor of English at Vanderbilt University, having joined the faculty in 1997 after stints at the University of the South and Carnegie-Mellon University.