Author and distinguished alumna Lorrie Moore will give a reading

By Franklin Crawford

Acclaimed short story writer Lorrie Moore, M.F.A. '82, will give a free public reading Monday, Nov. 8, at 7:30 p.m., in the Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium of Goldwin Smith Hall.

Moore is Cornell's 2004-05 Distinguished Alumni Artist Award recipient, an annual award established in 1997 by the Cornell Council for the Arts and the Committee on the Arts of Cornell University Council. On Nov. 9, Moore will join recent Cornell alumnus Carson Chan '04, for an awards presentation and reception in the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art. Chan won the 2004 Undergraduate Student Artist Award.

Moore was born in Glens Falls, N.Y., and attended St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y., from 1974 to 1978, receiving a B.A. and graduating summa cum laude. She attended the Cornell English department's Creative Writing Program from 1980 to 1982, receiving an M.F.A. Self-Help, a collection of stories that came out of Moore's work in the Cornell writing program, was published in 1985 to high praise.

Moore is the Delmore Schwartz Professor in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. As recently as last October, she received the Rea Award for short story writing, a $30,000 prize. In 1989 she received a National Endowment for the Arts Award and a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship. In 2000 she received an American Academy Award in Literature.

Her publications include: Birds of America (1998), Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? (1994), Anagrams (1986) and Self-Help. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's and The Paris Review, and they have been anthologized in Best American Short Stories and Best American Short Stories of the Century (1999). They have won O. Henry Awards and the National Magazine Award for fiction.

In a 1998 interview with Moore, critic Dwight Garner of Salon.com wrote:

"Moore's crackling wit and exacting eye make her America's sexiest writer; she seems incapable of putting a dull sentence to paper. What makes her one of America's most important writers, however, is the way her comedy bubbles up -- the way it does so often in life -- through discomfort, tragedy, awkwardness and loss."

The Distinguished Alumni Artist Award honors Cornellians who have achieved national or international success in the arts and to recognize that work with a campus presentation. Past recipients include sculptor Richard Artschwager '44, architect and educator Peter Eisenman '55, actor and director Gene Saks '43, lighting designer Jennifer Tipton '58, landscape architect Lawrence Halprin '39, painter Susan Rothenberg '66 and composer Steven Reich '57.

Chan currently is a master's candidate in architecture at the Harvard University School of Design. In addition to majoring in architecture at Cornell, Chan organized the Emerging Fashions Symposium on contemporary fashion and culture, founded The Cobbler, a student newspaper of social criticism, and directed Homeward Bound, a play performed at Risley Hall.

In nominating Chan for the award, Val K. Warke, Cornell associate professor of architecture, wrote: "I can think of no one who more thoroughly represents the breadth of Cornell's artistic community than Carson Chan. Indeed, he is genuinely both a product and a prodigy of our university's artistic aspirations."

Chan is the eighth undergraduate or recent undergraduate to receive the $1,000 award, which was established in 1997.