Author Steve Stern to give Moseley Lecture Feb. 16

“Creative Amnesia or the Persistence of Magic” is the title of the 2015 Edwin M. Moseley Faculty Research Lecture at Skidmore College, to be presented by Steve Stern, author and professor of English. The talk is scheduled to begin at 8 p.m. Monday, Feb. 16, in Gannett Auditorium, Palamountain Hall. Admission is free and open to the public.

The New York Times has called Steve Stern “the poet laureate of the Tennessee Jews”; Skidmore’s Scope magazine has called him “a born story teller.” His talk will present a personal take on how the magical strain in the literature of the Jews was found and lost and searched for again in the dark. Selection as the Moseley Lecturer is the highest honor the Skidmore faculty confers upon a colleague.

Born and raised in Memphis, Tenn., Stern left at age 17 to pursue the wayward life of his generation—in a squatters’ community in London and on a dirt farm in the Arkansas Ozarks. He returned by a circuitous route to his hometown, where in his early thirties he eventually became the director of the Ethnic Heritage Project at the Center for Southern Folklore. Along the way he obtained a B.A. degree from Rhodes College and an M.F.A. degree in creative writing from the University of Arkansas. He left Memphis for good in 1986 for a brief teaching stint at the University of Wisconsin, after which he came to Skidmore as a visiting lecturer. In 1993 he was given a half-time position as writer-in-residence. During his time at Skidmore he’s taken leaves to teach seminars in Prague and Vilnius, Lithuania; he taught a semester at Bar Ilan University in Israel and also at the University of Memphis as the Moss Chair of Excellence. In 2008 he was the Hurst Visiting Professor at Washington University in St Louis.

Stern’s books include the story collections Isaac and the Undertaker’s Daughter, Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven, The Wedding Jester, and The Book of Mischief; the novels The Moon and Ruben Shein, Harry Kaplan’s Adventures Underground, The Angel of Forgetfulness, and The Frozen Rabbi; a book of novellas, A Plague of Dreamers, and a novella, The North of God. Stern also wrote the children’s books Mickey and the Golem and Hershel and the Beast. A new novel, The Pinch, is forthcoming in June from Graywolf Press. Some of the books have received awards: the Pushcart Writer’s Choice Award for Isaac and the Undertaker’s Daughter, the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven, the National Jewish Book Award for The Wedding Jester; some of the stories have been included in prize anthologies such as the O. Henry and the Pushcart, and have been translated in seven languages. Three of the books were included in The New York Times lists of notable books of the year, and The Angel of Forgetfulness was selected as one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post.  He’s received grants from the Tennessee Arts Council and the Tennessee Commission for the Arts, fellowships from the Guggenheim and Fulbright foundations, and from the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire.