Author and Memoirist featured in MSUM’s McGrath Visiting Writer’s Series Oct. 22
Best-selling author Patricia Hampl will talk on the writer’s craft at 4 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 21 and read from her work at 4 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 22 both in MSU Moorhead’s King Hall Auditorium 110 as a feature of MSUM’s Tom McGrath Visiting Writers Series. It’s free and open to the public.
Hampl’s most recent book is “The Florist’s Daughter,” winner of numerous “best” and “year end” awards, including the New York Times “100 Notable Books of the Year” and the 2008 Minnesota Book Award for Memoir and Creative Nonfiction. “Blue Arabesque: A Search for the Sublime” (2006), was also one of the Times Notable Books. Hampl first won recognition for “A Romantic Education” (1981), her memoir about her Czech heritage, awarded a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship. This book and subsequent works have established her as an influential figure in the rise of autobiographical writing in the past 25 years.
Other books include “Virgin Time” (1993), a meditation about her Catholic upbringing and an inquiry into contemplative life, and two collections of poetry, “Woman Before an Aquarium” and “Resort and Other Poems.” “I Could Tell You Stories,” her collection of essays on memory and imagination, was a finalist in 2000 for the National Book Critics Circle Awards in General Nonfiction.
In 2004 the Minnesota Historical Society Press published “The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald” edited and with an introduction by Hampl. And in fall 2008 “Tell Me True: Memoir, History and Writing a Life” came out from the same imprint, co-edited by Hampl and Elaine Tyler May with essays by 14 memoirists including the editors.
Hampl’s fiction, poems, reviews, essays and travel pieces have appeared in many publications, including The New Yorker, Paris Review, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays. From 1990-95 she was a MacArthur Fellow. She lives in St. Paul and is Regents Professor and McKnight Distinguished Professor at The University of Minnesota.
Read more about Patricia Hampl at http://www.patriciahampl.com/