Award-winning Novelist Dorothy Allison to Read at Alma
Award-winning novelist Dorothy Allison will read from her published
works at 8 p.m. Thursday, March 15 at the Alma College Library.
Admission is free and open to the public.
Her best-known works are Bastard Out of Carolina, an exploration of growing up poor, southern and in a family marked by physical and psychological abuse, and Cavedweller, a novel about a woman who returns to the home, family and children she left behind many years before.
Allison, a native of Greenville, S.C., describes herself as “a
feminist, a working class storyteller, a Southern expatriate, and a
sometime poet,” according to her Website biography. A resident of
northern California, she was awarded the 2007 Robert Penn Warren Award
for Fiction.
She received recognition for Bastard Out of Carolina, a finalist
for the 1992 National Book Award. The novel won the Ferro Grumley Prize
and an American Library Association Award for Lesbian and Gay Writing
and became a bestseller and award-winning movie. It has been translated
into more than a dozen languages.
Cavedweller, published in 1998, became a national bestseller, a New York Times
Notable book of the year, a finalist for the Lillian Smith prize, and
an ALA prizewinner. The book also has been adapted for the stage and
screen.
Her short story, Compassion, was selected for both Best American Short Stories 2003 and Best New Stories from the South 2003.
The first member of her family to graduate from high school, Allison
attended Florida Presbyterian College on a National Merit Scholarship.
Allison’s reading is part of Women’s Month at Alma College and is
sponsored by the English Department, Women’s Studies and Women’s Issues
Advisory Board.
Posted: Mon, March 5th, 2007 at 1:42PM

