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 Featured Speakers
H.G. Bissinger
Wednesday, October 21
10:30-11:45 AM
The Writing Life: What was I Ever Thinking?
H.G. Bissinger is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Livingston Award, American Bar Association Silver Gavel
and the National Headliners Award.
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Bissinger is best known for his book Friday Night Lights, which documents the 1988 season of the football team of Permian High School in Odessa, Texas.
This work went on to become a successful film and television series both. Friday Night Lights has sold nearly two million copies. In a list of the one hundred best books on sports, Sports Illustrated ranked Friday Night Lights the best ever on football.
The New York Times said, “Friday Night Lights offers a biting indictment of the sports craziness that grips most of American society, while at the same time providing a moving evocation of its powerful allure."
Along with other non-fiction bestsellers like A Prayer for the City and Three Nights in August, Bissinger has demonstrated an undeniable knack for capturing the rhythms of life whether it is big cities, small towns or major league baseball.
Bissinger has said the book that most influenced his career as a writer was Common Ground by J. Anthony Lukas. Bissinger notes, “the first 15 years of my career were spent as a print journalist. I hungered for books of non-fiction and Lukas's book is an immaculate blend of reporting and narrative writing as he traced the roots and effects of the Boston busing crisis in the 1970s. The book serves as a model for everything that nonfiction book can be: insightful, dramatic, human, revealing. I read it 19 years ago, and nothing I have read since has ever topped it.”
Bissinger has been a contributing editor at Vanity Fair for over a decade, writing about subjects as diverse as Monument Valley and its influence on the American Western, the death of Barbaro, O.J. Simpson detective Mark Fuhrman, and the murder of an American soldier in his barracks at Ft. Campbell, Kentucky by a fellow soldier. His work has also appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Sports Illustrated, The New Republic and ESPN The Magazine. |
Connie Schultz
Thursday, October 22
9:45 – 10:45 AM
Title - TBD
A biweekly columnist for the Cleveland Plain Dealer-Creators Syndicate and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Connie Schultz has called public libraries her second home.
The author of …and His Lovely Wife: A Memoir from the Woman beside the Man reveals the rigors, joys and the chaotic dance of a new marriage at midlife and election campaigning with her husband. Schultz discusses the trials and tribulations of being an opinionated columnist and a political wife. Filled with eye-opening revelations about the election process,... and His Lovely Wife is one woman's story and insights on marriage, politics and the world of work.
Connie Schultz won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2005. Her other awards include the Scripps-Howard National Journalism Award, the National Headliners Award, the James Batten Medal, and the Robert F. Kennedy Award for social-justice reporting. Her narrative series "The Burden of Innocence," which chronicled the life of a man wrongly incarcerated for rape, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. She is married to U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown.
Marilyn Johnson
Friday, October 23
10:15-11:15 AM
Hold that Obit! The Rebirth of Librarians
Author Marilyn Johnson touts librarians as saviors from the overwhelming chaos of the digital age. She will discuss her second book, This Book Is Overdue! How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All, which is due for release in December 2009, and her unique writing career.
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Johnson made a name for herself penning memorable obituaries for the likes of Katharine Hepburn, Princess Diana, Jackie Onassis, and Johnny Cash for Life and other magazines. As such, she celebrates the cult and culture of the obituaries.
Her first book, The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries, is a fascinating look back at her experiences reading and writing obituaries. The title examines the art, history and subculture of this specific writing form, and also describes her trip to the Sixth Great Obituary Writers' International Conference in an old hotel in Las Vegas, New Mexico. The last day of the conference, June 5, 2004, two of the attendees ran into the room shouting that Ronald Reagan had died. T he news electrified the room of some 50 writers and fans. For obituary devotees, it was what Johnson calls a "perfect 11th-hour death." Humorist and author Roy Blount Jr. remarked about The Dead Beat, “if Marilyn Johnson had been meaner, I could have said she puts the bitch in obituary. Instead, she has written a warm, funny, appreciative book that, ironically enough, should live forever. But get it now.”
A run of extraordinary obituaries of librarians and library workers gave Johnson the subject for her next book. “Within a few months, I read obituaries of Henriette Avram, who automated the card catalog at the Library of Congress; Frederick Kilgour, who networked university catalogs in the early days of OCLC; a great orchestral librarian; a great map curator; a great archivist; and the librarian who made the resources of the British Film Institute available on the Web. I couldn't think of a profession that was changing more; it seemed a marvelous time to find visionaries and creative adaptors, and I soon realized that librarians' skills and values are essential these days to guide ordinary citizens through the maze of content and delivery systems, and to level the playing field. People talk about the death of librarianship in the age of Google. On the contrary, I feel I'm witnessing the rebirth of the profession.” |
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