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Friday Keynote
Mary Karr is a best-selling memoirist. She is the author of Lit, the long-awaited sequel to her critically-acclaimed and New York Times best-selling memoirs The Liars’ Club and Cherry. Hailed as “the memoir of the season,” Lit answers the question asked by thousands of fans: How did Karr make it out of that toxic upbringing to tell her own tale?
In Lit, Karr takes readers on the journey of her descent into the inferno of alcoholism and madness, and her astonishing resurrection. Not since St. Augustine cried, “Give me chastity, Lord – but not yet!” has a conversion story rung with such dark hilarity. Lit has garnered rave reviews across the country and was an immediate best-seller. The New York Times says with Lit, Karr “has written a book that lassos you, hogties your emotions and won’t let you go. . . Explores the subjectivity of memory even as it chronicles with searching intelligence, humor and grace the author’s slow, sometimes exhilarating, sometimes painful discovery of her vocation and her voice as a poet and writer. . . Karr writes with such intensity and poetry. . . This struggle to reconcile her past and present, her family and her future, is the steel-wired ribbon that not only runs through this affecting book, but that also connects it to Ms. Karr’s two earlier memoirs – the bright, elastic thread on which she so deftly strings the colored beads of her tumultuous life.” The Liars’ Club, Karr’s first memoir,won prizes for best first nonfiction from PEN (The Martha Albrand Award for nonfiction), the Texas Institute for Letters, and was a finalist for The National Book Critics Circle Awards. The Liar’s Club chronicled her hardscrabble Texas childhood with enough sass and literary verve to spark a renaissance in memoir, cresting the New York Times best-seller list for more than a year. Cherry, her account of a psychedelic adolescence and sexual coming-of-age, also became a best-seller. Karr is also a renowned poet. She has won prizes from Best American Poetry as well as Pushcart Prizes for both poetry and essays. Her four volumes of poetry are Sinners Welcome, Viper Rum, The Devil’s Tour and Abacus. Her work appears in such magazines as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, and Parnassus. Karr was the weekly poetry editor for the Washington Post Book World’s “Poet’s Choice” column, a position canonized by Bob Hass, Ed Hirsch, and Rita Dove. She lives in Syracuse, New York and New York City.
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