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POWELL, Wyo. - PEN/Faulkner Award winner David Bradley will talk about his writing and his views about changing Mark Twain’s writing when the Northwest College Writers Series presents its last author of the semester Tuesday, April 17. The program begins at a 7:30 p.m. program in the Hinckley Library Amphitheatre.
Bradley, an associate professor of fiction at the University of Oregon, is the author of two novels, “South Street” and “The Chaneysville Incident,” which was awarded the 1982 PEN/Faulkner Award and an Academy Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
His name recognition went up last year after CBS’s “60 Minutes” interviewed him for a segment titled “'Huckleberry Finn'” and the N-word.” Bradley, an African-American man, made the case for leaving the word “nigger” in Twain’s American classic, opposing the practice of a white publisher who replaced the word throughout the book with “slave.”
School districts across America that struggle when teaching “Huckleberry Finn” call in Bradley for his guidance.
After winning acclaim for a manifold treatment of race relations in his second novel, Bradley shifted genres in 1985 to work primarily in creative nonfiction, publishing pieces in Esquire, Redbook, The New York Times, The Nation, The Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker and Dissent.
His most recent writing has appeared online in “Obit, Narrative, and Brevity.” He has also published articles on and introductions to editions of works by Melville, Twain, Richard Wright, William Melvin Kelley and Edmund Wilson, and has co-edited The Encyclopedia of Civil Rights in America and The Sport of the Gods and Other Essential Writings of Paul Laurence Dunbar.
Bradley is a recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He’s also a National Book Awards judge and a nominating juror for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
He is currently completing a collection of creative nonfiction essays titled “Lunch Bucket Pieces: Creative Nonfiction New, Recycled and Reclaimed.”
Admission is free to Bradley’s program.
