Contact: Sammy McDavid
STARKVILLE, Miss.--The winner of a Pulitzer Prize and Guggenheim Fellowship who teaches creative writing in Florida will read from his works Feb. 4 at Mississippi State.
Free and open to all, the program featuring Robert Olen Butler begins at 7 p.m. in McCool Hall's Taylor Auditorium. Butler, the "mayor" and sole resident of the Capps community, will be visiting the university all week as the first MSU Institute for the Humanities Writer in Residence.
In 1993, he received the Pulitzer in fiction for "A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain." In addition to that award and a Guggenheim, his work has been honored with a National Endowment for the Arts grant and the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among other recognitions.
At Florida State University, Butler is the Francis Eppes Distinguished Professor and holder of the Michael Shaara Chair in Creative Writing. He is the author of 14 novels and six volumes of short fiction, as well as a volume of his lectures on the creative process titled "From Where Do You Dream." For more, see www.robertolenbutler.com.
Joining with the Institute for the Humanities to sponsor his campus visit are MSU's College of Arts and Sciences, Shackouls Honors College and Office of the Provost and Executive Vice President. Assistance also is provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities though the Mississippi Humanities Council.
For more on Butler's campus visit next month, contact institute program coordinator Shayln Claggett at 662-325-7095 or src173@msstate.edu.