Athens, Ga. – The Georgia Review at the University of Georgia will present a reading by novelist, essayist and short-fiction writer Pam Durban on Oct. 18 at 7 p.m. The event will be held at Ciné, which is located at 234 West Hancock Street in downtown Athens, and is free and open to the public.
The Louisiana State University Press recently published Durban’s latest novel The Tree of Forgetfulness. The book recovers the largely untold story of a brutal Jim Crow-era triple lynching in Aiken County, S.C. Writer and critic R.T. Smith called The Tree of Forgetfulness a “vivid and suspenseful novel” in which “even in the presence of tragedy, we can find reasons to rejoice.”
Durban also is the author of the novels The Laughing Place (1993) and So Far Back (2000) and the short-story collection All Set About with Fever Trees (1985), in which the title story was originally published in the summer 1984 issue of The Georgia Review. Her stories and essays have been widely published, and her story “Soon” was included in The Best American Short Stories of the Century (1999) and was edited by John Updike with Katrina Kenison.
Durban’s “This Heat,” originally published in the summer 1982 issue of The Georgia Review, was chosen by the journal’s editors for inclusion in the recently released Stories Wanting Only to Be Heard: Selected Fiction from Six Decades of The Georgia Review (University of Georgia Press, 2012).
Durban, who taught at Georgia State University from 1986-2001, currently is the Doris Betts Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina. In 2001, Durban received the Lillian Smith Book Award-which “honors authors today who, through their writing, carry on Smith’s legacy of illuminating the condition of racial and social inequity and propose a vision of justice and human understanding”-for So Far Back and in 1994 the Townsend Prize for The Laughing Place.
The Georgia Review, founded at the University of Georgia in 1947 and published quarterly there ever since, is widely considered to be one of the finest literary journals in the country. The Review has a longstanding record of serving the UGA and Athens communities by bringing in outstanding writers for public appearances.
For more information, contact The Georgia Review at 706/542-3481 or garev@uga.edu.
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