Robert Olen ButlerLee University continues its 2016-17 Writers Festival today, Feb. 23, with a visit by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler.
Butler will read at 7 p.m. in the Rose Lecture Hall in the Helen DeVos College of Education on the Cleveland, Tenn., campus. The free reading will be followed by a reception and book signing. Butler also will speak in an Encore class for senior adults on Southern literature during his time on campus.
Butler's writing explores topics such as empathy, human connection, identity, Vietnam and the love between parents and children.
"Butler writes about the complex interactions between people of different cultures, about Americans who travel overseas and Vietnamese immigrants who relocate to the United States," says Dr. William Woolfitt, an English professor. "His writing is poignant, humorous and insightful."
Butler served in the Army in Vietnam from 1969 to 1972.
He has published 16 novels and six volumes of short fiction, including "A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain" which won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction" and "Perfume River," his new novel.
Butler also has been awarded the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Literature, Pushcart Prizes and the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among other honors. He is a Francis Eppes Distinguished Professor at Florida State University.
His visit is made possible by a Literary Arts Touring Grant recently awarded to the university by South Arts, a regional arts organization.
For more information, email wwoolfitt@leeuniversity.edu.