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Author Alice McDermott to Visit Lit House
Location: Rose O’Neill Literary House
CHESTERTOWN, MD—Award winning novelist Alice McDermott will visit the Rose O’Neill Literary House at Washington College on Wednesday, March 18, to read from her work and talk about her processes and experiences as an author. The event (originally scheduled for March 4 but postponed by inclement weather) begins at 4:30 p.m. and is free and open to the public.
In 1975, when McDermott was studying at the State University of New York at Oswego, a professor told her, “I’ve got bad news for you. You’re a writer.” That comment set her on a course that has led to a career as an acclaimed fiction writer of numerous short stories and seven novels. Her third novel, Charming Billy, won the National Book Award for fiction in 1998, and several other works were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize: That Night (1987), At Weddings and Wakes (1992) and After This (2006).
Her seventh novel, Someone (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013), is an extraordinary book that revolves around a girl named Marie Commeford, whom a Publishers Weekly starred review described as “an ordinary woman whose compromised eyesight makes her both figuratively and literally unable to see the world for what it is.” Someone was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Book Award, and the 2014 Patterson Prize for Fiction. New York Times literary critic Janet Maslin wrote, “Someone is a wonderfully modest title for such a fine-tuned, beautiful book filled with so much universal experience, such haunting imagery, such urgent matters of life and death.”
McDermott is the Richard A. Macksey Professor for distinguished teaching of the Humanities
at Johns Hopkins University. Her visit to Washington College is sponsored by the Sophie
Kerr Lecture Series, which brings visiting artists ranging from novelists and playwrights
to editors from around the world to campus to read and discuss their work.
The Rose O’Neill Literary House is located at 407 Washington Avenue. For more information about this and other upcoming literary events, email llusby2@washcoll.edu or visit the Literary House event page at www.washcoll.edu.