Allan Gurganus is first speaker in 2011 River City Writers Series

Allan Gurganus

Admirers of Allan Gurganus’ first novel, “Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All,” will be happy to learn that it was the beginning of a trilogy: The author is at work now on the second in the series, provocatively titled “The Erotic History of a Southern Baptist Church.”

Gurganus will be the first speaker in the 2011 River City Writers Series at the University of Memphis. Monday,2/7 he’ll read from his work at 8 p.m. in the University Center Bluff Room on the U of M campus. Tuesday, he’ll be available for interview at 10:30 a.m. in Patterson Hall, Room 456. Both events are free and open to the public.

Fiction by the North Carolina native has been included among the O. Henry Prize Stories, Best American Short Stories and The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction.

“Confederate Widow,” published in 1989, won the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In the sweeping historical novel, a 99-year-old character named Lucy tells the story of her relationship with Civil War veteran Will Marsden, who was 50 when she married him at 15. His traumatic war memories, the burning of his family’s plantation by Sherman’s men, and the abduction from Africa of Lucy’s friend and midwife all are part of the grand-scale drama. A CBS adaptation of the work, starring Donald Sutherland, Diane Lane and Cicely Tyson, won four Emmy awards.

Gurganus graduated from Sarah Lawrence College and the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and has taught at those schools as well as at Stanford and Duke universities. His first published story, “Minor Heroism,” appeared in the New Yorker in 1974, and featured the first gay fiction character the magazine had ever presented, according to the author’s website, alangurganus.com.

Gurganus’ story and novella collection called “White People” won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

For more information on the event or the River City Writers Series, which began in 1977, e-mail creativewriting@memphis.edu or call 678-4692.

Brockmeier at Davis-Kidd

Another graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Little Rock-based author Kevin Brockmeier, will be at Davis-Kidd Booksellers at 6 p.m. Monday to talk about and sign his novel “The Illumination” (Pantheon, $24.95), published Feb. 1.

In this new work of fantasy fiction, the wounds and illnesses of six characters literally shimmer with light, and the recipients of “Illumination” are connected by a journal that transfers among them. “No longer able to hide their own pains from the world, and suddenly exposed to the discomfiting wounds of strangers, friends and lovers, these characters struggle to adapt to a new way of experiencing life and, in very different ways, to understand the intrinsic connection between love and pain,” said the review for Amazon Best Books of the Month.

Brockmeier has been included among Granta magazine’s Best of Young American Novelists and has won three O. Henry Awards. He is the author of “The Brief History of the Dead” and “The Truth About Celia,” and the story collections “Things That Fall from the Sky” and “The View from the Seventh Layer.”

Memphis author Molly Crosby will be at Davis-Kidd at 6 p.m. Tuesday to sign the paperback edition of “Asleep: The Forgotten Epidemic That Remains One of Medicine’s Greatest Mysteries” (Berkley, $15).

Crosby, a science writer and journalist, also wrote “The American Plague,” about yellow fever.

“Asleep” chronicles the progress of sleeping sickness after World War I. It begins in 1918, when doctors in two separate hospitals in Europe began describing a bizarre strain of flu that caused symptoms ranging from weeks of uninterrupted sleep to insomnia and insanity.

Davis-Kidd Booksellers is at 387 Perkins Ext. Call 683-9801, or visit daviskidd.com.

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