Arts & Letters Live: Special Events

Not-to-be-missed events that support Arts & Letters Live

Elizabeth Gilbert, February 24, 2009, 7:30 p.m.—The Eisemann Center
David Sedaris, April 19, 2009, 7:30 p.m.—McFarlin Auditorium, SMU
Sherman Alexie and Colson Whitehead, May 1, 2009, 7:30 p.m.—UTD
Novel Destinations, June 2, 2009, 7:30 p.m.
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Elizabeth Gilbert
Tuesday, February 24, 2009, 7:30 p.m.
Charles W. Eisemann Center
2351 Performance Drive
Richardson, Texas 75082

Eat, Pray, Love catapulted Elizabeth Gilbert into literary stardom and has become a best-selling phenomenon, with over five million copies in print. The memoir follows Gilbert—who leaves behind a divorce, affair, and depression—on a yearlong quest to bridge the gulf between body, mind, and spirit. In a carefully constructed narrative, she explores “the art of pleasure in Italy, the art of devotion in India, and, in Indonesia, the art of balancing the two.” Her writing—imbued with candor, wisdom, vitality, and wry, self-deprecating humor—has won her millions of loyal fans. Eat, Pray, Love was #1 on the New York Times Best Seller list for over a year and has been translated into over thirty languages. Gilbert has appeared as a guest on The Oprah Winfrey Show to discuss the book, and Time magazine named her to their 2008 List of the World’s 100 Most Influential People.
After graduating from New York University, she used money earned while working at a diner to travel, as she says “to create experiences to write about, gather landscapes and voices.” Her work for Spin magazine caught the eye of editors at GQ, which proved to be fertile ground for Gilbert, resulting in a run of colorful profiles and stories that eventually turned into books and movies. Gilbert muses, “I think my gift as a human is that I can make friends with people very quickly. . . . Everything I learned about being a journalist I learned by being a bartender. The most exquisite lesson of all is that people will tell you anything.”
Upon the release of Pilgrims, Gilbert’s collection of short stories, author Annie Proulx praised her as “a young writer of incandescent talent.” Pilgrims received the Pushcart Prize and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. The author was also nominated for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for her nonfiction account of the back-to-basics woodsman Eustace Conway in The Last American Man.

“Elizabeth Gilbert is everything you would love in a tour guide of magical places she has traveled to both deep inside and across the oceans: she’s wise, jaunty, human, ethereal, hilarious, heartbreaking, and God, does she pay great attention to the things that really matter.” —Anne Lamott on Eat, Pray, Love

By the Author
Eat, Pray, Love (2006), The Last American Man (2002), Stern Men (2000), Pilgrims (1997)

To order tickets for this program only, please call the Eisemann Center at 972-744-4650 or order online at www.eisemanncenter.com.

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Special Event with David Sedaris
Benefiting the Kay Cattarulla Endowment for the Literary and Performing Arts
Sunday, April 19, 2009, 7:30 p.m.

McFarlin Memorial Auditorium
Southern Methodist University
6405 Boaz Lane
Dallas, Texas 75275

David Sedaris may well be the closest thing the literary world has these days to a rock star—his speaking engagements are now consistently standing-room only.
Sedaris made his comic debut in 1992, when National Public Radio began broadcasting his “SantaLand Diaries.” The great skill with which Sedaris slices through cultural euphemisms and political correctness proves that he is a master of satire and one of the most observant writers addressing the human condition today. He is a regular contributor to the New Yorker and Esquire, and his original radio pieces can often be heard on This American Life. There are a total of seven million copies of his books in print, and they have been translated into twenty-five languages.
In 2001 Sedaris received the Thurber Prize for American Humor, and Time magazine named him “Humorist of the Year.” His wit has been compared to that of Mark Twain and Dorothy Parker, and Publishers Weekly dubbed him “Garrison Keillor’s evil twin.”
The San Francisco Chronicle says that “Sedaris belongs on any list of people writing in English at the moment who are revising our ideas about what’s funny.”
His latest collection of essays is When You Are Engulfed in Flames. In them he recounts the buying of a human skeleton, a parasitic worm that once lived in his mother-in-law’s leg, and his own attempt to quit smoking—in Tokyo.
At this event, Sedaris will read from new and unpublished material.

“One of America’s most prickly, and most delicious, young comic talents.” —The Washington Post

Tickets for this event range from $25 to $65; you will be able to purchase your reserved seat online.

By the Author
Essays and Stories: When You Are Engulfed in Flames (2008), Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (2004), Me Talk Pretty One Day (2000), Naked (1997), Holidays on Ice (1997), Barrel Fever (1994)
Audio Recordings: David Sedaris Live at Carnegie Hall (2003), which received a Grammy nomination for Best Comedy Album in 2005; The David Sedaris Box Set (2002)

Promotional Partner: KERA 90.1 FM

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Sherman Alexie and Colson Whitehead
Friday, May 1, 2009, 7:30 p.m.

University of Texas at Dallas
Conference Center
800 West Campbell Road
Richardson, Texas 75080

In partnership with the School of Arts & Humanities at UTD
Don’t miss this opportunity to hear two of the best of a new generation of writers explore common threads of love, loss, and music in their fiercely funny coming-of-age novels!
The New York Times hailed Sherman Alexie as “one of the major lyric voices of our time.” Raised on a reservation in Washington, Alexie explores the myths and reality of the contemporary American Indian experience. He has earned spots on the 1996 list of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists and the New Yorker’s 20 Writers of the 21st Century. His short story collection, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, won the 1993 PEN/Hemingway Award.
Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian won the 2007 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature and was named to over a dozen Best Book of the Year lists. The protagonist is a fourteen-year-old named Junior who was born with water on the brain, is regularly the target of bullies, and loves to draw. Inspired by Alexie’s own teenage years, the book grapples with questions of community and identity. While in Dallas, he will discuss this book along with his forthcoming young adult novel, Radioactive Love Song (April 2009). Narrated by William, who recently lost his mother, it is a 21st-century urban Indian road odyssey, complete with a broken down car named Argo and an iPod full of classic love songs containing heartfelt messages from his mother.
Colson Whitehead’s debut novel, The Intuitionist, wowed critics and readers alike and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. John Updike said of Whitehead’s stunning second novel, John Henry Days, “[It] does what writing should do; it refreshes our sense of the world.” The novel was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Whitehead was the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” and the Whiting Writers Award. He will discuss his latest novel, Sag Harbor (April 2009), a warm, funny portrayal of Benji, one of the only black kids at an elite prep school in Manhattan in 1985. This novel mines the awkwardness of teenagers and masterfully explores racial and class identity. A graduate of Harvard College, Whitehead currently lives in Brooklyn.

“Being funny, you win hearts quicker; people laughing are more apt to listen.”
—Sherman Alexie

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Novel Destinations
Shannon McKenna Schmidt
Tuesday, June 2, 2009, 7:30 p.m.

Whether you’re a savvy wanderer who knows that a good book makes the perfect traveling companion, or a dedicated armchair adventurer who wants to learn more about the places favorite novelists have made their own, join us for an evening inspired by the book and travel guide Novel Destinations: Literary Landmarks from Jane Austen’s Bath to Ernest Hemingway’s Key West, written by Shannon McKenna Schmidt and Joni Rendon and published by National Geographic.
In the book, you’ll find classic literary landscapes, from the wild moorlands of the Brontë sisters and Wordsworth’s daffodil-dotted Lake District to Dostoevsky’s brooding St. Petersburg. Stateside you’ll travel across Robert Frost’s New England to the Deep South of William Faulkner and the rolling hills of Jack London’s California ranch land. Featured sites and events include everything from author houses and museums to legendary libraries, festivals, and walking tours. A sampling of restaurants, pubs, inns, and hotels where famous scribes once dined and dozed rounds out your literary itinerary.
The second half of the book explores ten locales immortalized by famed novelists, illuminating little-known stories about the places so indelibly associated with their work. There is Jane Austen, famously linked with the resort town of Bath despite her preference for the simple pleasures of country life over the city. Equally interesting is to learn how Victor Hugo’s novel The Hunchback of Notre-Dame inspired early literary travelers. Like browsing a good library, readers can wander from Franz Kafka’s Prague to Charles Dickens’s London, James Joyce’s Dublin, John Steinbeck’s Monterey, Louisa May Alcott’s Massachusetts, and much more.
At the event, we invite you to write down and share your own literary travel anecdotes; Arts & Letters Live staff will compile and post them on the Web after the event to inspire new ideas for your adventures in years to come.
About the Author
Schmidt’s work has appeared in National Geographic Traveler and Pages and on Bookreporter.com; she is a regular contributor to Shelf Awareness (shelf-awareness.com) and ReadingGroupGuides.com. She spent ten years working in the book publishing industry, most recently as Marketing Manager at Simon & Schuster. Schmidt lives in Hoboken, New Jersey.

“Globe-trotters and armchair bibliophiles will discover lots of reading suggestions, interesting facts and bits of little-known literary gossip.” —The Tampa Tribune

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*Unless otherwise noted, events are held in Horchow Auditorium at the Dallas Museum of Art

Arts & Letters Live is supported by the Kay Cattarulla Endowment for the Literary and Performing Arts, The Hoglund Foundation, Annual Series Supporters, and the Donor Circle membership program through gifts by Claire Dewar and Sewell Automotive Companies. Additional support is provided by Friends of the Dallas Public Library.
BooksmART series supported by The Hogland Foundation.
Air transportation is provided in part by American Airlines. Hotel accommodations provided in part by The Adolphus. Pre-program food and beverages for performers provided by Sodexo. Promotional partners include The Dallas Morning News and Einstein Printing.
The Dallas Museum of Art is supported in part by the generosity of Museum members and donors and by the citizens of Dallas through the City of Dallas/Office of Cultural Affairs and the Texas Commission on the Arts.