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Southwestern University hosted a public appearance by acclaimed writer Russell Banks on Tuesday, October 30, at 7:30 pm in Alma Thomas Theater. Following Mr. Banks' address, he signed copies of his books at a reception in Caldwell Carvey Foyer. Russell Banks was raised in New Hampshire and eastern Massachusetts.
The eldest of four children, he grew up in a working-class, hardscrabble
world that has played a major role in shaping his writing. Mr.
Banks attended Colgate University, and later graduated Phi Beta
Kappa from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Before
he could support himself as a writer, he tried his hand at plumbing,
and as a – compiled from various promotional materials and book reviews.
Mr. Banks has won numerous awards and prizes for his work,
among them a Guggenheim Fellowship,
Prior to Mr. Banks' visit to Southwestern, the library sponsored a series of informal discussions centering on two of Mr. Banks novels: Affliction (Harper, 1990) Banks' protagonist, Wade Whitehouse, 41, is imprisoned by fate in Lawford, New Hampshire, a hell frozen over. He digs wells for chump change, lives in a trailer, drinks, and alienates his daughter. In two weeks' time, Wade demolishes whatever hopes he had for family happiness. In flashbacks to his Dad-abused youth, we understand how Wade is doomed to continue the cycle of failure. The Sweet Hereafter (HarperCollins, 1992) Banks builds a world--a small U.S. town near Canada--and peoples it with four vivid, sensitive souls linked by a school-bus tragedy: the bus driver; the widowed Vietnam vet who was driving behind the bus, waving at his kids, when it went off the road; the perpetually peeved negligence lawyer who tries to shape the victims' heartaches into a winning case; and the beauty-queen cheerleader crippled by the crash, whose testimony will determine everyone's fate. The acclaimed Atom Egoyan-produced movie version debuted in 1997.
Mr. Banks' appearance is partially funded by the Susan Vaughan Foundation, Inc. of Houston. Through the generosity of the Foundation, the Writer's Voice is pleased to bring literary artists of national and international prominence to the Southwestern University campus. |
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shoe salesman
and window trimmer. More recently, he has taught at a number
of colleges and universities, including Columbia University,
Sarah Lawrence, 
University
of New Hampshire, New England College, New York University and
Princeton University. Russell Banks is married to the poet Chase
Twichell, and is the father of four grown daughters. Through a
dozen novels and short story collections that have won him Guggenheim
and NEA grants and a St. Lawrence Prize for fiction, Banks has
made a life's work of charting the causes and effects of the
terrible things "normal" men can and will do. He writes
with an intensely focused empathy and a compassionate sense of
humor that help to keep readers, if not his characters, afloat
through the misadventures and outright tragedies in his books.
(With William Matthews and Newton Smith) 15 Poems,
Lillabulero Press (Chapel Hill, NC), 1967.
National Endowment for the Arts Creative
Writing Fellowships, Ingram Merril Award, the St. Lawrence Award
for Short Fiction, O. Henry and Best American Short Story Award,
the John Dos Passos Award, and the Literature Award from the
American Academy of Arts and Letters. Continental Drift was
a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 and Affliction
was short-listed for both the PEN/Faulkner Fiction Prize and
the Irish International Prize. In early 2001, Russell Banks was
elected as President of The International Parliament of Writers,
following Wole Soyinka and Salman Rushdie.