Date: Apr 13, 2007

Author Mary Gordon to speak at Hofstra as part of Catholic Lecture Series

Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY – Popular Catholic author Mary Gordon will speak at Hofstra on Wednesday, April 18 as part of the Department of Religion’s Lecture Series in Catholic Studies: Catholicism and Literature. The lecture begins at 6:30 p.m. in the Rochelle and Irwin A. Lowenfeld Conference and Exhibition Hall, 10th Floor, Joan and Donald E. Axinn Library, South Campus
 
The Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of Writing and chair of the English Department at Barnard College in New York, Prof. Gordon is an award-winning novelist, essayist, and critic whose most recent works include The Stories of Mary Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 2006), a collection of short stories, and the novel Pearl (New York: Pantheon, 2005). She is the recipient of a Lila Acheson Wallace Reader's Digest Writer's Award and a Guggenheim fellowship.

She is also the author of four bestselling novels: Final Payments, The Company of Women, Men and Angels, and The Other Side. Her other works include The Shadow Man (1996), a memoir of her self-hating and secretive Jewish father; Spending: A Utopian Divertimento (1998), which follows the adventures of financially independent New York artist and single mother Monica Szabo as she searches for a compatible male companion; and Seeing Through Places: Reflections on Geography and Identity (Scribner, 2000), a close examination of the places that have shaped the author and her fiction, including Long Island City, Columbia University and the Upper West Side of Manhattan

Prof. Gordon was born and raised in Long Island City. According to the New York State Writer’s Institute, of which she is a member, “Her work evokes the Catholic melting pot of New York's outer boroughs as well as the rarefied world of Manhattan academia. Francine du Plessix Gray, writing in the New York Times Book Review, called Gordon, ‘her generation's preeminent novelist of Roman Catholic mores and manners. . .’”

Earlier this year, Peter Manseau, author of the critically acclaimed memoir Vows: The Story of a Priest, a Nun, and Their Son, (New York: Free Press, 2005) spoke at Hofstra as part of the same lecture series, which was established last fall following the installation of Prof. Julie Byrne, Ph.D., as the Monsignor Thomas J. Hartman Chair in Catholic Studies at Hofstra.

Hofstra University is a dynamic private institution where students find their edge to succeed in more than 140 undergraduate and 150 graduate programs in liberal arts and sciences, business, communication, education and allied human services, and honors studies, and a School of Law.