An Evening with Wally Lamb
Artist and Author Series
Presented by the Warner Theatre Center for Arts Education, A Sacred Place, Inc. and The
Hickory Stick Book Shop.
Spend an engaging evening with New York Times bestseller Wally Lamb, author
of She's Come Undone, I Know This Much is True and The Hour I First
Believed, and other guest speakers as they explore the American correctional
system. Program will include a Q&A period and selected readings from Lamb's
nonfiction anthologies Couldn't Keep It to Myself: Testimonies from Our
Imprisoned Sisters and I'll Fly Away, collections of autobiographical essays
which evolved from a writing workshop Lamb facilitates at Connecticut's York
Correctional Institute, a maximum-security prison for women.
Special event to benefit the Warner Theatre and A Sacred Place, Inc.
A limited number of signed books by the author will be available for
purchase at the event.
* VIP tickets include premium seating, plus a private pre-event reception
and opportunity to purchase signed books in advance of general admission.
The author will be in attendance.
Wally Lamb’s first two novels, She’s Come Undone (Simon and Schuster/Pocket, 1992) and I Know This Much Is True (HarperCollins/ReganBooks, 1998), were # 1 New York Times bestsellers, New York Times Notable Books of the Year, and featured titles of Oprah’s Book Club. I Know This Much Is True was a Book of the Month Club main selection and the June 1999 featured selection of the Bertelsman Book Club, the national book club of Germany. Between them, She’s Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True have been translated into eighteen languages.
Lamb is also the editor of the nonfiction anthologies Couldn’t Keep It to Myself: Testimonies from Our Imprisoned Sisters (HarperCollins/ReganBooks, 2003) and I’ll Fly Away (HarperCollins, 2007), collections of autobiographical essays which evolved from a writing workshop Lamb facilitates at Connecticut’s York Correctional Institute, a maximum-security prison for women. He has served as a Connecticut Department of Corrections volunteer from 1999 to the present.
Wally Lamb is a Connecticut native who holds Bachelors and Masters Degrees in teaching from the University of Connecticut and a Master of Fine Arts in Writing degree from Vermont College. Lamb was in the ninth year of his twenty-five year career as a high school English teacher at his alma mater, the Norwich Free Academy, when he began to write fiction in 1981. He has also taught writing at the University of Connecticut, where he directed the English Department’s creative writing program.
Wally Lamb has said of his fiction, “Although my characters’ lives don’t much resemble my own, what we share is that we are imperfect people seeking to become better people. I write fiction so that I can move beyond the boundaries and limitations of my own experiences and better understand the lives of others. That’s also why I teach. As challenging as it sometimes is to balance the two vocations, writing and teaching are, for me, intertwined.”
Honors for Wally Lamb include the Connecticut Center for the Book’s Lifetime Achievement Award, the Connecticut Bar Association’s Distinguished Public Service Award, the Barnes and Noble “Writers for Writers” Award, the Connecticut Governor’s Arts Award, The National Institute of Business/Apple Computers “Thanks To Teachers” award. Lamb has received Distinguished Alumni awards from Vermont College and the University of Connecticut. He was the 1999 recipient of the New England Book Award for fiction. I Know This Much Is True won the Friends of the Library USA Readers’ Choice Award for best novel of 1998, the result of a national poll, and the Kenneth Johnson Memorial Book Award, which honored the novel’s contribution to the anti-stigmatization of mental illness. She’s Come Undone was a 1992 “Top Ten” Book of the Year selection in People magazine and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Best First Novel of 1992.
Wally Lamb’s third novel, The Hour I First Believed, explores chaos theory by interfacing several generations of a fictional Connecticut family with such nonfictional American events as the Civil War, the Columbine High School shootings of 1999, the Iraq War, and Hurricane Katrina. The book was published by HarperCollins in November of 2008 and reached #4 on the New York Times bestseller list.
Wally and Christine Lamb are the parents of three sons, Jared, Justin, and Teddy. |
