October 5, 2000

Award-winning Author Ernest Gaines To Speak Oct. 5 for President's Lecture Series

Old Dominion University

Ernest J. Gaines, award-winning author of "A Lesson Before Dying," will speak Thursday, Oct. 5, as part of Old Dominion University's President's Lecture Series in conjuction with the 23rd Annual Literary Festival.

"Gaines on Gaines" will be presented at 8 p.m. in the Mills Godwin Jr. Life Sciences Building Auditorium. The lecture is free and open to the public.

One of America's most important writers, Gaines crafts novels that are studies of the African-American experience in the South. He was born in 1933, in the bayou country of Oscar, La., a landscape that has provided the setting for much of his work.

Gaines' explorations of the South, including "In My Father's House" and "A Gathering of Old Men," have earned him critical acclaim and comparisons to William Faulkner. His novel "A Lesson Before Dying" won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 1993 and was made into a movie, as was his earlier work, "The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman."

The recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Gaines is also a Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundation fellow. He has taught at various institutions, including Stanford and Denison universities.

For more information about the President's Lecture Series, call 683-3116.