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Lycoming College’s English department is pleased to welcome award-winning author Michael Cunningham for a reading in Mary Lindsay Welch Honors Hall this coming fall. The event will take place on Wednesday, Oct. 17, at 7:30 p.m., and is free and open to the public.
Cunningham is a senior lecturer of creative writing at Yale University. His 1998 novel “The Hours,” which won the Pulitzer Prize and was the basis for the Academy Award-winning movie of the same title, is widely considered to be a masterpiece, and all publications in his prolific body of work have received the highest critical praise.
“Cunningham seems incapable of writing without elegance and poignant observation,” said Sascha Feinstein, Robert L. and Charlene Shangraw Professor at Lycoming College and director of the reading series. “I frequently find his poetic prose to be breathtaking — a word that I rarely use. I can think of very few writers, if any, who have composed books of such consistent brilliance.”
In addition to “The Hours,” Cunningham’s novels include “A Home at the End of the World,” “Flesh and Blood,” “The Snow Queen,” “Specimen Days,” and “By Nightfall.” His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, and other publications. He is also the author of a lyrical memoir, “Land’s End: A Walk in Provincetown,” and the short story collection “A Wild Swan and Other Tales.”
One of the most in-demand authors in the United States, Cunningham will be brought to campus as part of The Himes/Sweeney Visiting Scholar in Creative Writing series, endowed by Diane Sweeney ’60 and her husband John Sweeney in 2011. “The Sweeneys’ generosity has been invaluable,” said Feinstein. “Our whole community owes them an incalculable debt.”