September 16, 2021
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Buffalo, NY - The Canisius University Contemporary Writers Series will welcome award-winning author Mary Karr on Tuesday, October 5, 2021. Karr is the author of three bestselling memoirs: The Liar’s Club, Cherry and Lit. She also penned five volumes of poetry, most recently Tropic of Squalor. Karr will speak at 7:00 p.m. in the Montante Cultural Center. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. The event will also be livestreamed.
Mary Karr was born and raised in East Texas and attended Macalester College and Goddard College. She is a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry, winner of Whiting Writer’s Award, a Radcliffe Bunting Fellowship, and an NEA grant. Karr is currently the Peck Professor of Literature at Syracuse University.
Karr rose to fame in 1995 with the publication of her memoir, The Liar’s Club, which documented her Texas childhood. The book won nonfiction prizes from PEN and the Texas Institute of Letters and was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Liar’s Club rode high on The New York Times bestseller list for more than a year, becoming an annual “best book” for The Times, as well as The New Yorker, People and Time.
Karr followed up the Liar’s Club with two more bestselling memoirs, Cherry, in which she recounts her tumultuous teenage years and Lit, the story of her battle with alcoholism. In 2015, Karr released the bestselling The Art of Memoir, in which she speaks of her expertise as a professor, a therapy patient, writer, spiritual seeker and recovering alcoholic. Her unique insight and experience provides her art with a masterful perspective.
Founded with a grant from the John R. Oishei Foundation and continued through the Peter Teaching Professorship Program, the Contemporary Writers Series is generously supported today by the Hassett, Scoma and Lowery Endowments and with the cooperation of The Buffalo & Erie County Public Library, Just Buffalo Literary Center, the Center for Urban Education and Talking Leaves Books.
For more information on the event or to watch the livestream of the event, contact Mick Cochrane, coordinator of the Contemporary Writers Series, at (716)888-2662 or @email.
One of 27 Jesuit universities in the nation, Canisius is the premier private university in Western New York. Canisius prepares leaders – intelligent, caring, faithful individuals –able to pursue and promote excellence in their professions, their communities and their service to humanity.
