Keynote Authors
Julia Keller
Julia Keller, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, is the author of the forthcoming mystery novel set in West Virginia, A Killing in the Hills, which will be published by St. Martin’s Press in August.
Julia was born and raised in Huntington, West Virginia. Her father, the late Dr. James R. Keller, was a mathematics professor at Marshall University for many years; her mother Patricia is a retired English teacher at Chesapeake High School in Chesapeake, Ohio.
Julia graduated from Marshall with a degree in English. She later earned a doctoral degree in English at the Ohio State University; her dissertation explored literary biographies of Virginia Woolf. She has been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and served as McGraw Professor of Writing at Princeton University. She has also taught at The University of Notre Dame and The University of Chicago.
Her books include Mr. Gatling’s Terrible Marvel (Viking, 2008), a non-fiction account of the inventor of the Gatling Gun, Richard Jordan Gatling, and how the weapon transformed nineteenth-century America; and Back Home (Egmont, 2009), a young adult novel about a teenage girl whose father suffers a traumatic brain injury while serving with the National Guard in Iraq. Booklist named Back Home one of the top ten debut novels of the year for young adults.
A Killing in the Hills is the first in a series of mysteries featuring Belfa Elkins, a single mother who returns to her West Virginia hometown and runs for prosecuting attorney, hoping to combat the scourge of prescription drug abuse in Appalachia.
Julia won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for her three-part series on a deadly tornado that swept through Utica, Ill., in 2004. The series ran in The Chicago Tribune, the newspaper for which Julia, whose title is cultural critic, writes a weekly literary column.
William Vollmann
Distinctive for his boundless ambition and extraordinary output—23 books to date, counting the 7-volume, 3,352-page, Rising Up and Rising Down series—Vollmann fully inhabits two often polarized literary worlds. “One of the most unnerving aspects…is his combination of journalistic immediacy with profound moral inquiry” (Chicago Tribune). That duality has earned him comparisons to Thomas Pynchon.
In Vollmann’s case, “journalistic immediacy” is a euphemism for suicide missions. Named by the New Yorker in 1999 as “one of the twenty best writers in America under 40,” Vollmann has achieved cult-status with legions of twenty-something readers for embracing taboo subject matter and highly dangerous situations.
Running with the Afghan guerrilla muhajadin against Soviet invaders; smoking crack with street prostitutes; nearly freezing to death, alone for two weeks in the North Pole; losing two friends while escaping gunfire in a Bosnian war zone—all “with a disregard for personal danger that would shame Hunter S. Thompson, or Jack London, or Errol Flynn” (Madison Smartt Bell, The New York Times Magazine). His denial of any death-wish aside, there is little Vollmann won’t try in the pursuit of authenticity.
His literary awards include, the 2005 National Book Award for Fiction for Europe Central (2005), the PEN Center USA West Award for Fiction for the short story collection The Atlas (1996) and the 1988 Whiting Award for his cyberpunk debut, You Bright and Risen Angels: A Cartoon (1987). Vollmann also won the 1989 Shiva Naipaul Memorial Award for an excerpt from Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle award for Rising Up and Rising Down (2003) and Imperial (2009). His articles have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, Esquire, Spin, Gear, Granta, Grand Street and Outside Magazine.
Born in Santa Monica, California in 1959, Vollmann attended Deep Springs College, Cornell University (summa cum laude) and did graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley. He lives in Sacramento, California.
Thursday, April 26th Huntington Museum of Art
