Events

Thurs 7/29  7pm-8pm An Evening with Louis Rubin and Duncan Murrell Louis Rubin (legendary author, editor and teacher) in conversation with Duncan Murrell (contributing editor of Harpers magazine) talking about writing, reading and editing.  Louis D. Rubin is a writer, editor, publisher, educator, and literary critic, and perhaps the person most responsible for the emergence of southern literature as a field of scholarly inquiry. He served on the faculty of Hollins College (now Hollins University) in Roanoke, Virginia. He coedited Southern Renascence, an important compilation of southern studies; founded the journal Hollins Critic; established the Southern Literary Studies series at the Louisiana State University Press; cofounded the Southern Literary Journal; cofounded Algonquin Books, a literary press that showcases emerging southern writers; and promoted the early work of important southern writers, including Clyde Edgerton, John Barth, and Virginia writers Lee Smith and Annie Dillard. In 1982 Rubin and Shannon Ravenel, a Hollins graduate, founded Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, one of the most successful commercial trade publishers outside of New York. Algonquin published the work of a new generation of southern writers, discovering, for example, Clyde Edgerton, Larry Brown, Jill McCorkle, and Kaye Gibbons. Rubin retired from the University of North Carolina in 1989 and from Algonquin in 1991. He has continued to write prolifically, publishing books on boats, trains, baseball, Jewish history, and journalism. In all, he has written or edited more than fifty books and helped shape the course of dozens of young writers' careers. Duncan Murrell is a writer and journalist from North Carolina. He is a contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine and The Normal School. His work has also appeared in Poets &  Writers, The Oxford American, Southern Cultures, and many other publications. He has been a guest on NPR's Talk of the Nation. In 2006 he spent eight months living in New Orleans while writing “In The Year of the Storm,” a long work that appeared in the July 2007 issue of Harper’s Magazine, and prompted a Chicago Tribune critic to write, “Speaking of words, few essayists put them together any better … crucial to an understanding of what catastrophe leaves in its tumbling wake, as seen through one man's tormented consciousness." Murrell has written about termites, vultures, and hogs; he’s written profiles of national politicians and old tobacco magnates; and he’s written extensively on the economics and social life of small towns. He’s currently at work on a book about transformation and immigration in the rural South, to be excerpted soon in Harper’s Magazine. Before writing full-time, Murrell was an editor at Algonquin Books, where he acquired and edited several national bestsellers in fiction and nonfiction. He also has worked as a newspaper writer in Alabama and Washington D.C. He is a graduate of Cornell University and Northwestern University.