UR Writers Series: David Shields March 27, 2010

David Shields's most recent book, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead, (Knopf, 2008), was a New York Times bestseller. He is the author of eight previous books, including Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity, winner of the PEN/Revson Award; and Dead Languages: A Novel, winner of the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. Shields has received a Guggenheim fellowship, two NEA fellowships, and an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, among others. He teaches in the English department at the University of Washington. His new book, Reality Hunger: a Manifesto, will be published by Knopf in January 2010. The title of his talk is "Genre is a Minimum-Security Prison."

Brown-Alley Room, Weinstein Hall

Official Website: http://news.richmond.edu/english/2009/english-writers-series.html