Athens, Ga. – Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Richard Ford will deliver the Ferdinand Phinizy Lecture in the Chapel on the University of Georgia campus on Friday, Sept. 18, at 11 a.m. The event is open free to the public.
Winner of the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for his novel Independence Day, Ford also won the PEN/Faulkner Prize for that book-the first to receive both awards simultaneously. He is also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2001 PEN/Malamud Award for Short Fiction and the 1995 Rea Award for the Short Story.
Author of five novels and three collections of short stories, Ford had critical success with his first novel-A Piece of My Heart (1976) and then The Ultimate Good Luck (1981).
In addition to his novels, Ford has written three short-story collections, Rock Springs (1987), Women with Men: Three Stories (1997) and recently, A Multitude of Sins: Stories (2002), a series of stories exploring infidelity.
The Ferdinand Phinizy Lectureship was established and endowed by Phinizy Calhoun, UGA class of 1900, as a memorial to his grandfather, Ferdinand Phinizy, who was a graduate of the UGA class of 1838.
Born in Jackson, Miss., in 1944, Richard Ford grew up in Jackson and Little Rock, Ark. After graduating in 1966 from Michigan State University in East Lansing, he earned an M.F.A. in creative writing at the University of California-Irvine.
A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Ford taught at Williams, Princeton, Harvard and Northwestern. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, Granta, Le Monde and The New Yorker among other magazines and journals.
He lives in East Boothbay, Maine, with his wife, Kristina.
For more information, contact Jim Cobb at 706/542-2053.
