Widely published writer Robert Morgan will visit Mississippi
State University on Thursday and Friday.
Morgan is the author of “Gap Creek” about the
turn-of-the-century Appalachian life of a couple in their first
year of marriage. On Thursday, Morgan will read excerpts from his
book, which was chosen as an Oprah Book Club selection and won the
Southern Book Award, and discuss his work and what he has observed
about writing at the Colvard Student Union at 7:30 p.m.
“I believe it’s the thing that draws me to writing the most.
It’s to get away from myself and the little problems I’m having and
to get into the usually worse problems of the characters,” Morgan
said in an interview with Oprah.
On Friday, Morgan has a different mission: he will speak at the
spring semester seminar “Readers and Writers in American History:
From Puritan Diaries to Oprah’s Book Club.” The English department,
history department and University Honors Program are sponsoring
Morgan’s visit.
Morgan is from North Carolina and received his bachelor’s degree
from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Morgan received
his master’s degree in fine arts from University of North Carolina
at Greensboro.
After his college years, Morgan began as an instructor of
English at Salem College in Winston-Salem, N.C.. He then returned
to his birthplace of Hendersonville and worked as a farmer,
housepainter and writer. It was in Hendersonville during this time
that Morgan completed his first published collection of poetry,
“Zirconia Poems.”
Since 1971, Morgan has been an English professor at Cornell
University in Ithaca, N.Y. and has been published in the Atlantic
Monthly, the New Republic, the Yale Review, the Carolina Quarterly,
the Pembroke Magazine, Epoch and the New England Review. He has
been honored with four National Endowment for the Arts fellowships,
a Guggenheim Fellowship and the North Carolina Award for
Literature, among others.
Morgan has also published fiction novels such as “The
Hinterlands,” “The Truest Pleasure” and “The Rock,” along with two
story collections, “The Blue Valleys” and “The Mountains Won’t
Remember Us,” and 10 volumes of poetry.
A night with Robert Morgan should prove to be an interesting and
rewarding opportunity to learn more about this Appalachian writer
and his work.