Distinguished Novelist and Teacher Robert Olen Butler to Speak at Wabash College

Robert Olen Butler

Crawfordsville, IN —The Will Hays, Jr. Visiting Writers Series at Wabash College will sponsor a reading by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler on Thursday, September 25 at 8:00 p.m. Butler will be reading from and talking about his writing. His reading will take place in the Korb Classroom of the Fine Arts Center.

Butler has published 12 books since 1981: nine novels including, The Alleys of Eden, Sun Dogs, Countrymen of Bones, On Distant Ground, Wabash, The Deuce, They Whisper, The Deep Green Sea, Mr. Spaceman, and Fair Warning, and two volumes of short fiction, Tabloid Dreams and A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, which won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

His stories have appeared widely in such publications as The New Yorker, Esquire, The Paris Review, Harper's, GQ, Zoetrope, The Hudson Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Sewanee Review. They also have been chosen for inclusion in four annual editions of The Best American Short Stories, seven annual editions of New Stories from the South, and numerous college literature textbooks.

A recipient of both a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction and a National Endowment for the Arts grant, he also won the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. His short story "Fair Warning" won a 2001 National Magazine Award in Fiction which is the basis for his new novel of the same name. He was also a charter recipient of the Tu Do Chinh Kien Award given by the Vietnam Veterans of America for "outstanding contributions to American culture by a Vietnam veteran."

Since 1995 he has written feature-length screenplays for New Regency, Twentieth Century Fox, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Disney, and Universal Pictures and two teleplays for HBO.

He is the Francis Eppes Professor holding the Michael Shaara Chair in Creative Writing at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Fla., and is married to the novelist and playwright Elizabeth Dewberry.

Professor Butler’s three-day visit to Wabash includes meetings with Wabash classes and his participation in a one-day workshop (Creative Writing/Creative Teaching) for Indiana’s middle school and high school English Teachers. The visit is sponsored by the Will Hays, Jr., Visiting Writer Series. Butler is the first writer in this series, which is supported by a generous gift from the Hays family to celebrate Mr. Hays’ distinguished career as a writer, public servant, supporter of secondary and higher education, and alumnus and trustee of Wabash College.

Butler’s reading is free and open the public.