Author Lorrie Moore to visit Skidmore Nov. 3

Award-winning author (and area native) Lorrie Moore will participate in a Q&A at 8 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 3, in Zankel Music Center, Ladd Concert Hall. Linda Hall, a professor in Skidmore's English Department, will participate in the conversation, which is free and open to the public. Moore will engage in a book signing following the talk, which is sponsored by the College's First-Year Experience.

Moore is Delmore Schwartz Professor in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The Glens Falls native earned a B.A. degree summa cum laude at St. Lawrence University and an M.F.A. degree at Cornell. 

Her most recent book, A Gate at the Stairs (Alfred A. Knopf,2009) was the assigned summer reading for the Class of 2015. The book tells the story of a transformative year in the life of Tassje Keltjin. New York Times critic Michiko Kakutanicalled the book "powerful," adding that it "gives us an indelible portrait of a young woman coming of age in the Midwest in the year after 9/11 and her initiation into the adult world of loss and grief."

Moore's other titles includethe short story collections Self-Help, Like Life, and Birds of America, and the novels Anagrams and Who Will Run the Frog Hospital. She edited the fiction anthologies I Know Some Things: Stories about Childhood by Contemporary Writers and Best American Short Stories 2004. Her work appears in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, Paris Review, and many other literary publications. Her short stories have frequently been reprinted in anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories of the Century edited by John Updike, the Best American Short Stories anthologies, and the Prize Stories: The O'Henry Awards series.

Moore is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation, as well as the Rea Award for the Short Story and the Irish Times International Prize for Fiction. She is a member of both the Wisconsin and the American Academies of Arts and Letters.

For more information on Moore and her work, please see the following:  

• The New York Times  reviews  A Gate at the Stairs.
• Moore talks with The New York Times about A Gate at the Stairs.
• A conversation between Jacquelyn Mitchard and Lorrie Moore.