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Reading Series, Spring 2008
The Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry
Distinguished Visiting Professor, 2007-2008
Contact: creativewriting@emory.edu
DOROTHY ALLISON, novelist
Dorothy Allison grew up in Greenville, South Carolina, the first child of a fifteen-year-old unwed mother who worked as a waitress. Now living in Northern California with her partner Alix and her teenage son Wolf Michael, she describes herself as a feminist, a working-class storyteller, a Southern expatriate, a sometime poet and a happily born-again Californian. The first member of her family to graduate from high school, Allison attended Florida Presbyterian College on a National Merit Scholarship and in 1979, studied anthropology at the New School for Social Research.
Allison received mainstream recognition with her novel Bastard Out of Carolina (1992), a finalist for the 1992 National Book Award. The novel won the Ferro Grumley Prize, an American Library Association Award for Lesbian and Gay Writing, became a best seller, and an award-winning movie directed by Anjelica Huston. It has been translated into more than a dozen languages.
Cavedweller (1998), also a national bestseller, was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and was an American Library Association prize winner and a finalist for the Lillian Smith Prize. Adapted for the stage by Kate Moira Ryan, the play was directed by Michael Greif, and featured music by Hedwig composer Stephen Trask. In 2003, Lisa Cholodenko directed a movie version starring Kyra Sedgwick.
The expanded edition of Trash (2002), Allison's collection of short stories, included the prize-winning "Compassion," selected for both Best American Short Stories 2003 and Best New Stories from the South 2003.
A novel, She Who, is forthcoming from Riverhead.
Awarded the 2007 Robert Penn Warren Award for Fiction, Allison is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers.
Dorothy Allison is the Emory University Center for Humanistic Inquiry Distinguished Visiting Professor, 2007-2008.
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