Robert Day to Present at Lipcon Auditorium, Palmer Museum

Robert Day—novelist, essayist, poet—will present a talk titled “Bar Art: John Sloan’s McSorley’s Old Ale House Paintings, a Vargas Girl behind the Bar at Ruby Red’s in New Orleans, The Luncheon of the Boating Party on the Kansas Prairie, and Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère in Paris—plus e.e. cummings, Bob Dylan, and Joseph Mitchell—A Travel Memoir with Pictures.”  The talk will be held in the Palmer Lipcon Auditorium in the Palmer Museum of Art at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, April 5.  His appearance is sponsored by the Penn State English Department. 

        Day’s novel The Last Cattle Drive was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection.  His short fiction has won a number of prizes and citations,including two Seaton Prizes, a Pen Faulkner/NEA prize, and Best American Shortstory and Pushcart citations. His fiction has been published by Tri-Quarterly,Black Warrior Review, Kansas Quarterly, North Dakota Quarterly, and New Lettersamong other belles-lettres magazines. He is the author of two novellas, In My Stead, and The Four wheel Drive Quartet, as well as Speaking French in Kansas, a collection of short stories.

        His nonfiction has been published in the “Washington Post Magazine”,“Smithsonian Magazine”, “Forbes FYI”,  “Modern Maturity”, “WorldLiterature Today,” and “American Scholar.” As a member of the Prairie Writers Circle his essays have been reprinted in numerous newspapers andjournals nationwide, and on such internet sites as Counterpunch. Recent bookpublications include We Should Have Come By Water (poems) and The Committee to Save the World (literary non-fiction).

        Among his awards and fellowships are a National Endowment to the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, Yaddo and McDowell Fellowships, a Maryland Arts Council Award, and the Edgar Wolfe Award for distinguished fiction.  His teaching positions include The Iowa Writers Workshop; The University of Kansas; and the Graduate Faculty at Montaigne College, The University of Bordeaux.

        He is past President of the Associated Writing Programs; the founder and former director of the Rose O’Neill Literary House; and founder and publisher of the Literary House Press at Washington College, Chestertown, Maryland where he is an Adjunct Professor of English Literature.

        Words Make a Life, a collection of his short fiction, will be published in September, 2012 by BkMk Press.