The Bestselling Author on the Role of the Memoirist in Literature

Mary Karr's first memoir, "The Liar's Club," won nonfiction prizes from PEN and the Texas Institute of Letters. Also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, it rode high on the New York Times bestseller list for over a year, becoming an annual "best book" there and for The New Yorker, People, and Time. Recently, Entertainment Weekly rated it number four in the top one hundred books of the past twenty-five years. Her second memoir, Cherry, which was excerpted in The New Yorker, also hit bestseller and "notable book" lists at the New York Times and dozens of other papers nationwide. Her most recent book in this autobiographical series, "Lit: A Memoir," is the story of her alcoholism and recovery, the triumphs and travails of motherhood, and learning to write by learning to live. 

Karr is an award-winning poet and best-selling memoirist. She is the author of the critically-acclaimed and New York Times best-selling memoirs "The Liars' Club," "Cherry," and "Lit," as well as "The Art of Memoir," and five poetry collections, most recently "Tropic of Squalor." Karr is also a songwriter, having collaborated with Rodney Crowell, Norah Jones, Lucinda Williams and others on a country album called KIN. Her many awards include The Whiting Writer's Award, an NEA, a Radcliffe Bunting Fellowship, and a Guggenheim. She is also a regular contributor to The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Poetry magazine. Karr is the Peck Professor of Literature at Syracuse University and she lives in New York City. 

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The 2019 Arlington Reads series features four women writers – the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, a New York Times-bestselling memoirist, an acclaimed journalist and New Yorker staffer, and the two-term poet laureate of the United States – whose diverse voices and experiences remind us that everyone has a story.

• Location campus Central Library
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  • Events for Adults
  • Good for Adults Age 55+
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