Author Ernest J. Gaines Here as Bryan Distinguished Visiting Professor

Award-winning author Ernest J. Gaines will visit Greensboro Nov. 14-15 as Guilford College's Bryan Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Arts, Humanities and Public Affairs. His visit is in conjunction with the One City, One Book program sponsored by the Friends of the Greensboro Public Library.

The Bryan Distinguished Visiting Professorship enables Guilford to invite leading figures in the arts, humanities and public affairs to have discussions with students and faculty and share reflections on their life and work with the greater community. Trustee and alumnus Joseph M. Bryan Jr. '60 and the former Kathleen Price Bryan Family Fund established the professorship, and the first honoree visited Greensboro in the fall of 1996.

Gaines will talk about his life and work in public presentations at Dana Auditorium on the Guilford campus Nov. 14 at 3 and 7 p.m. He will make other public appearances Nov. 15 at the Jamestown campus of Guilford Technical Community College (Noon) and the Greensboro Central Library (6 p.m). While in Greensboro he will also visit Dudley High School and the International Civil Rights Museum.

The One City, One Book program, in celebration of library's centennial, has featured an all-city read of Gaines' novel A Lesson Before Dying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 1993. The book was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and was adapted for the theatre and television. The Triad Stage presentation of the theatre adaptation has been well received.

"The library is grateful to Guilford College for its participation in the One City, One Book program and its sponsorship of Mr. Gaines' visit to Greensboro," said Sandy Neerman, director of the library. "People in our community will have the opportunity to hear Mr. Gaines discuss his life and work, and readers of A Lesson Before Dying will have the rare occasion to meet and ask questions of the man who wrote this powerful novel. It will be a fitting culmination to our all-city read."

A Lesson is the story of a young black man wrongly condemned to the electric chair by a white jury in 1948, and of the teacher who tries to help him meet his death as a man and not as a hog, the characterization given him by the defense attorney.

Gaines was born in Louisiana in 1933 but moved to California when he was 15 because he had no access to high school in the segregated South. He entered a public library for the first time when he was 16 and ultimately decided to become a writer. A graduate of San Francisco State College, he has been writer-in-residence at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette since 1983.

In addition to A Lesson, his works include The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971) and A Gathering of Old Men (1984), both of which were adapted for television.

Nov. 14, 2002